Agile Teams: Conflict Resolution

Domain I: People (42%)

• When managing team members with conflicting technical solutions, delays can occur.
• Facilitating understanding of different perspectives and developing solutions jointly is the best approach to conflict resolution.
• During project status meetings, heated arguments between team members sometimes arise over missed deadlines
• To resolve this, stop the meeting and address the conflict privately with those involved.
• Smoothing/accommodating is a conflict resolution technique which involves emphasizing areas of agreement to maintain harmony.
• Negotiating is not a recognized conflict resolution technique.

Agile Teams & Conflict Resolution

• When handling disagreements about implementation approaches for user stories within agile teams, servant leaders can facilitate discussions to help team members understand each other's viewpoints and achieve consensus.
• If conflict arises between a key stakeholder and a technical team regarding requirements change, and the stakeholder is unhappy while the team is frustrated, bring the stakeholder and the team together to clarify requirements, ensure concerns are heard, and seek an acceptable solution
• When managing a highly experienced and self-motivated team fully capable of deciding how to do their work,allow teams to organize and make decisions on their own while providing support and remove obstacles.
• Project managers should temporarily adopt a directive style, if teams are uncertain about roles and responsibilities on a new project and are hesitant to take initiative, which will clearly define roles, responsibilities, and expectations for the team.

Handling Team Challenges

• Private discussions with team members to understand concerns and find constructive ways to voice ideas productively addresses challenges made by senior team members during project meetings.
• Effective servant leadership in agile projects involves shielding the team from interruptions, facilitating collaboration, and empowering team members to make decisions.
• When a major scope change is introduced midway during a project, team morale can be improved by managers communicating a clear vision of the change and supporting team adjustments to plans.
• Team morale and productivity can be re-energized and re-focused by recognizing hard work and organizing brief respites or team-building activities.
• Investigating the root causes by talking to team members and identifying any impediments or morale issues is a best practice when team performance significantly drops in the last iteration, mid-project.

Project Manager Support

• If one team member is consistently missing deadlines and producing subpar work, private discussions with said team member should be held to identify any challenges, and agree on a plan for improvement and support.
• Scheduling regular one-on-one meetings with team members, ensures effective project team performance, which provides feedback and coaching.
• Project managers can support team performance by publicly acknowledging the team's accomplishments after successful major deliverables are met on time and within budget.
• Issues raised over slowing processes during project retrospective, can be resolved by the project manager when they facilitate a discussion to explore the issues and encourage the team to propose improvements to their process.
• Project managers can best support declining output from normally high-performing team members, due to personal issues outside of work, by providing empathy and discussing possible adjustments to their workload, or scheduling temporarily, while maintaining necessary project coverage.

Empowerment and Agile Leadership

• Decision making boundaries, delegation of authority are the best ways to increase team empowerment to counter members seeking approval on every minor decision.
• When a project team member brings a new potentially improve project delivery that differs from what was initially planned, empower the team by evaluating the idea with the team; if it has merit, allow the team to pilot the approach.
• Change an overbearing approach - Assign tasks and then frequently checks in on how each task is being done, often providing unsolicited direction leading to a drop in team morale - to provide guidance and support only when asked or needed, allowing the team more autonomy in their work: coaching role.

Stakeholders

• Project managers can encourage collaboration, when the project's product owner feels unheard, by inviting product owners to actively participate in iteration planning or requirements workshops so their priorities are directly heard and considered.
• Project managers must balance giving team members authority to make decisions while still holding them accountable for results.
• Incorporating training activity/ramp-up time in the the project schedule is the best action to take, when discovering team lacks experience with a new technology critical for project success,
• Quick training or a workshop on new tools which can improve project efficiency can be arranged for teams unfamiliar with it, evaluate if it's then beneficial to incorporate into the project.
• Stakeholders can be provided with orientation or training on agile principles and how teams implement them, if key stakeholders have difficulty understanding the approach, potentially leading to misaligned expectations
• Providing specific training/mentoring for team member to improve skills while ensuring their tasks are covered, aids under-performing team members because of lack skills for their tasks, but there is still a significant portion of the project left
• Proactively taking action and implementing cross-training among team members so that skills are shared and backups are available for key roles, when projects involve a variety of technical areas to ensure the team can handle unexpected challenges
• Organize project kickoff meetings that includes team-building activities and a discussion of team norms and objectives, for new teams put together with members from various departments who have never worked together.

Teams

• Project manager should provide support and facilitate communication, when during the early phases of projects, team members clash and form sub-groups, and progress is slow as everyone figures out how to work together. in other words, project managers should respond to the team in its storming stage.
• When specialized skills are required for projects but aren't available internally, project managers should work with the sponsor or procurement to hire a contractor or vendor who provides the expertise.
• In virtual teams having trust and communication issues, project managers can build team integration by scheduling virtual team-building sessions or informal video conference meetups to help team members socialize and build rapport.
• The primary benefit of team-building workshops that are organized midway through the project is to improve team collaboration and trust, leading to better performance on project tasks.

Impediments

• In a daily stand-up meeting, when a team member raises an issue over a critical component from an external vendor, which is blocking their task, project managers should contact the vendor to understand the delay and work on expediting the component's delivery, or finding a workaround.
• Adjusting workload or schedule temporarily and finding additional support is an appropriate action for solving an issue to allow team progress, when team member faces a personal difficulty, preventing them from focusing on work.
• Addressing contract clauses, escalating issues, and negotiating resolutions are ways to fix bottlenecks, when third-party contractor's deliverable is overdue, blocking team's progress on a critical path task.
• Meet with the functional manager to discuss the issue and negotiate a solution that protects the team member's time for project work, addresses obstacle when in a matrix organization, team member on your project is frequently pulled away by their functional manager for other work, causing project tasks to slip.
• To resolve key document approval bottlenecks: reach out to the stakeholder directly with a clear deadline and offer to provide any additional information they need to make a decision.

Coaching

• Agile coaches can ensure impediments are addressed throughout projects by maintaining an impediment log, proactively removing obstacles or escalating them when necessary, and encouraging team members to surface impediments.
• Best approach to negotiate a resource agreement with functional manager hesitant to release functional department engineer: highlight the projects importance and mutually discuss a solution, such as a part-time allocation or adjusting timelines to accommodate sharing the resource.
• Project sponsor schedule compression requests but is at full capacity, negotiate a feasible project agreement with sponsor like: trading off with sponsors, such as reducing scope or increasing resources, to realistically meet shorter timelines.
• In a resource conflict between two high-priority projects you manage,coordinate resource sharing arrangement/adjusted schedules with the other project manager to accommodate both projects' critical needs.
• Conflict of over committment with product owners should be handled in agile projects by facilitating a negotiation between product-owner and the team, to reach a realistic commitment, focusing on the team's capacity and the highest-value items.
• When projects require assistance from IT departments for significant infrastructure setups - establish a supportive agreement by working with the IT head to define what support is needed, highlight the benefits/necessity for project, and agree on a support plan that balances both teams" workloads.

Vendor Negotiation

• Long term partnerships can be secured through contracts with vendors, via win-win solutions such as adjusting scope or payment terms, so vendors can meet budget constraints while maintaining profitable deals.
• New stakeholders can be on-boarded - and increase their engagement - by reaching out to them to understand their concerns/constraints, and involve them in a way that works for them.
• Collaborative stakeholder engagement methods exist, facilitating joint requirements workshops/planning meetings, when projects involve multiple departments with potentially conflicting interests, to ensure all stakeholders are on same page and can collaborate effectively.
• Regular check-in meetings that listen specifically to stakeholder's ideas, resolves issues when a stakeholder complains that their ideas are not being considered in project and often have useful insights
• Project managers must ensure requirements are the same among teams by organizing workshops/facilitated discussion with the team and the requirement's originator, to discuss and clarify the requirement.
• Best illustrated with inviting key stakeholders to co-create the project schedule and risk management plans with the team's, is collaboration with stakeholders, rather than just managing communications.
• Facilitation of discussion with project objectives - focusing in a mediated session - and compromising for alternative solutions addresses main needs of parties, when two stakeholders have views on project requirements.
• Shared misunderstandings among project teams after delivering a prototype - solved by project mangers involving the client and team in a joint review of requirements, using techniques like prototypes prior to confirmation.
• Shared misunderstandings can be resolved, for new stakeholders joining a project midway with different interpretations, by an alignment meeting to go over project charter scope, clarifying any misunderstandings.
• Ensure requirements are understood by all team members, when a team is interpreting a a key requirement: organize a workshop with the team to make sure everybody has the same understanding of requirements.

Communication

• Clear definition of done agreed is essential for a team - agreed upon by the team and stakeholders concerning constitutes completion of a feature - prevents debate on wether certain minor changes need to completed before considered done.
• Best built with team meetings and overview sessions - sharing the project vision - is building shared understanding between team members on a complex project.
• Rotating meeting times / finding overlapping hours that are shared among team members is a method that resolves frustration from team members spread across time zones that have to join meetings early or late.
• To better engage remote team members experiencing isolation from the team members, set up regular video conferencing check-ins, and encourage informal team interactions ( ie, virtual coffee chats).
• Cultural differences in the workplace can be best supported through cultural sensitivity training to establish team norms supporting different cultures (norm for communication style, holidays, etc).
• Best tool for virtual projects, a collaboration platform for centralizing communication, documents, and documents that keeps it visible for everyone.
• Project managers can build more trust for project members who hesitate to trust colleagues by setting clear goals/roles, following through on commitments, and encouraging team members to recognize each others work.

Team Management

• Ground rules for teams at project kick off are best when collaboratively made with work expectations, meetings, communication, and other team expectations.
• Best action to take, when the team agreed that all meetings would start on time as a ground rule, but members have been arriving late to them: remind the team of the ground rule at the next meeting and discuss as a team how to address consistent lateness.
• Ground rules for a partly remote or collocated team need to be inclusive: rules for are for both collocated, and remote workers + respects time zone differences