A520.2.3.RB_PALUGODCAROLYN

I used to work for an IT Firm whose prime business was to recruit IT contractors and subcontract them out to companies that had short-term IT projects.  My job was as the mediator between our contractors and our clients.  Part of my job was to talk to our clients and find out their needs.  Then I would communicate this to our recruitment team who would find the appropriate talent for the client’s project.  Once the match was made, my job consisted of being a mediator between the contractor and the client.  I had to make sure that both the contractor and the client were happy.

I once encountered an issue-focused conflict with a particular client who was not happy with the IT contractor we had placed for their project (Whetten & Cameron, 2011).  My role in the conflict was as the mediator between the client and the contractor.  I needed to listen to both the client’s and contractor’s perspectives of the issue at hand.  I also was required to speak to other staff members who interacted with the consultant we hired.

The conflict involved a claim by the client that the contractor seemed to be inefficient and seemed to take unusually long to complete certain tasks.  They also were told by other team members on the project that errors had been made, but they couldn’t specifically say if they were made by my consultant.  When talking with my consultant, he claimed that he was completing his tasks in a timely matter to the specifications of the client but that the reason things were taking longer than usual to cycle out was due to poor planning on the managerial side.  He also stated that other mundane tasks that were not specified as his job duties were being delegated to him.  In an effort to appease the project manager in charge of the project, he completed these tasks at the expense of his assigned project. 

This problem was resolved once the client realized that the project managers had been using poor management of their IT resources by delegating mundane tasks to the specialized IT contractors instead of delegating the tasks to the IT Help Desk whose prime job was to resolve these issues. Whetten and Cameron define this type of conflict as “informational deficiencies”  which are conflicts based on a misunderstanding or misinformation (Whetten & Cameron, 2011, p. 381). The PM’s defended their position by explaining that they were behind schedule and since IT Help Desk had been saturated with work, they sometimes needed to pull in the resources of other IT staff.  This lack of organization and time management reflected on the work of our contractor.  The client’s initial reaction was to support the PM’s being that they were permanent staff and therefore they assumed that the problem lied with the hired contractor.  Once I was able to explain the perspective of our contractor to our client, they were able to further investigate the problem and corrective action was taken. 

In this situation, negotiation of the facts was needed since much of the issue was based on miscommunication.  Both parties were communicative and understanding and therefore there was a quick resolution of the conflict.

References
Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing management skills (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.