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Let's Make a Deal: Negotiating Skills for IT Managers
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October 20, 2003 (Computerworld) -- As manager of the program control office at Main Street America Group, Paul Freitas oversees IT projects at the insurance company's Jacksonville, Fla., offices. He makes plenty of deals with vendors, but some of his toughest negotiations involve prying human resources from hard-pressed internal managers.
Similarly, Bridget Finerty, head of the service assurance center at The Mitre Corp. in Bedford, Mass., negotiates with department heads for project resources and with internal customers on service-level agreements. Intracorporate bargaining is so much a part of her job at the not-for-profit research organization that she thinks of negotiation as "another word for navigating through conversations."
Although vendor negotiations get a lot of attention, most IT negotiations are internal. "In IT, you negotiate all day long -- with co-workers, teammates, internal IT clients and business clients, not to mention vendors," says Lisha Wentworth, a senior facilitator at Ouellette & Associates in Bedford, N.H., which runs negotiating workshops for IT professionals.
Negotiations in IT are challenging because they require "a wide bandwidth of personality," says G. Richard Shell, professor of legal studies and management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Bargaining for Advantage (Penguin, 1999). "Inside negotiations require tact and diplomacy, and outside negotiations sometimes require you to be pretty tough," he explains. Here's some advice from experts for getting to a better deal:
Do your homework. "Preparation is critical," says Robert Mnookin, chairman of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and author of Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes (Harvard University Press, 2000). Gather information about hidden pressures in the other party's department. Consider possible scenarios ahead of time.
Don't play to win. "One of the biggest errors in negotiation is to see it as a zero-sum game: What you win, I lose; what I win, you lose," Mnookin says. "You can often expand the pie for the win-win." This is especially important in intracorporate IT deals.
Consider the alternatives. Before you begin, think of the alternative if no deal is reached. For example, as the IT leader, can you move on to a different project if the other party won't commit enough resources? "The better that alternative, the more power you'll have at the bargaining table," Mnookin says.
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