Common Causes of Conflicts in Project Management

If you are preparing for PMP exam, get familier with common causes of conflicts in project management. If a project manager knows the reasons behind conflicts, he or she will be able to get prepared before the conflict occurs.

Below is a list of common source of conflicts arise during project management processes among project stakeholders in an order of occurence frequency according to PMP.

1. Schedules
2. Project priorities
3. Resources (aka manpower)
4. Technical opinions

Conflict Sources: Schedules

The most frequent cause of conflicts in project management area is schedules.
Time plans visualized by schedules is the main conflict cause among all project stakeholders not only between project team. A project manager must have seriously deal with schedules, time plans for meetings with stakeholders. It is even better to reserve times of project participants at the beginning of a project like weekly meetings in a long run.

Project Priorities as Conflict Cause

An other cause that arise project conflicts is project priorities. Especially in matrix organization structured companies, different department managers might have different priorities which can put the project priorities in the second place. In such cases project tasks can experience delays which are under the responsibility of project staff of that department manager.

Resources aka Man Power

Project tasks require resources. Especially human resources for a project is limited. This unique resource is one of the reasons lying behind project conflicts.

Other Project Conflict Causes

One of the conflicts that teams experience during project execution is the technical options. We can add cost objectives, and perhaps most figurable cause as personality conflicts between members of project team and stakeholders, too.

If you are a project manager who experience conflicts in project management processes, you should be using one of the project management conflict resolving techniques like smoothing, compromise, forcing or collaborate.