7. Conflicts described, their causes, and the results

As mentioned before, conflicts arose due to communication challenges between stakeholders and project coordination. The conflicts consisted of direct and indirect complaining about the project manager and participants. Stakeholders that were inadequately included during every step of the project felt they were intentionally left out. Other stakeholders who were more than adequately included in the project progress complaint about those stakeholders that came in later and changed the project content or caused project progress delays.

The project manager was accused that he did not know the process of the change project, the marketing material development, and the stakeholders well enough. That was of course true, but it was not the project manager’s fault. This lack of knowledge was mostly due to the lack of organizational processes mapped out. The marketing department and the IT department did not even have a complete understanding of the involvement of the legal department in respect to the marketing material design. Some people suggested not to including the legal department in decisions but rather telling them what changes need to be made.

Communication was already poor due to the existing environmental conflicts. It worsened even more with the time and geographic market location differences. When stakeholders were on the defensive when it came to protecting their job boundaries, they became even more agitated when they felt stepped on or forgotten. Complaints usually went to each stakeholder’s direct manager rather than trying to enhance the relationship quality between stakeholders and also the project manager.

And since stakeholders and project manager mostly relied on email correspondence, the relationship between these individuals became increasingly strained.  Electronic communication methods, as has been discussed already in this paper, were not supportive of relationship building with this stakeholder team. In the case of this project, departments became so defense that various department heads pushed blame and fault from one to the other. They designed processes as part of the project completion or participation to document other department’s errors, lack of contribution, and failed participations.

The result of conflict during the change project was nearly-completed marketing materials. These materials lacked in some cases market reviews, customer service stakeholder reviews, and/or final legal review. They were not completed because of time delays, of arguments and conflicts between the stakeholder departments, and because it was difficult to get all stakeholders participate and then to agree with the changes.

When changes had to be made and it was unclear if stakeholders would ever agree, the project manager simply had to decide to move forward, or miss important print deadlines.  This way, the change project became an ongoing project with the attitude of multiple future change editions. The problem however was that most stakeholders expected that this change project would be one with a foreseeable end in sight. From experience however, it was determined that due to the environmental changes, internally, and externally, and due to time associated change impacts, it was nearly impossible to predict an end. But rather, it would have been advisable to look at the change project as an ongoing project.

The conflicts between the stakeholder teams led to the disassembly of the project management team and the responsibility was passed on to a promotion hungry employee. The employee quit her job about 4 weeks later. Nobody from the project team was ever briefed or interviewed for intelligence to determine what they knew about the project. About 18 months later, the company still has incompliant marketing materials in its local markets all over around the world.