IPMA Perspective Competence Element — Negotiation

In my last article on IPMA, I wrote about the eighth competence element in the People Area, Resourcefulness. In this article, I am writing on the next competence element of the People Area: Negotiation.

This competence element is to enable the individual to reach satisfactory agreements with others by using negotiation techniques.

I am not a good negotiator, and I do not know about the techniques and theories of negotiation. I believe that many readers will have a similar response to this. You are not alone. My focus is straightforward, to make things work for all the parties, and this will involve some form of Give & Take from all the parties.

There is one time that I need to ensure that all the types of equipment arrive at the site for a project that has a very tight timeline. One of them needs to depart from Seoul and arrive in Shanghai for an installation. A delay from Seoul causes a cascading delay effect throughout the entire supply chain. To ensure that we have the equipment on-site for the installation, we made many Adhoc calls and discussed how to work this situation out.

We arranged for an additional vehicle to pick up the items from customs immediate upon clearance. We adjusted the installation work on-site to start with another thing first and shift this to the end of the day. A supervisor from my partner was deployed to follow the vehicle to expedite the delivery and ensure that we provided all the relevant documentation to prevent any further delay. Fortunately, we managed to put all these together and finished the installation as agreed.

We ended up paying additional to make those arrangements, and my partner had to call up his team to get things moving at the last minute. Fortunately, everything worked out well.

I am not good at negotiation, but I try to discuss and work out the alternatives to ensure we all get things done.

Execution of this CE depends on the other CEs and cannot happen in a silo. The other CEs include Design, Goals, Objectives & Benefits, Procurement and others.

Thank you for reading, and I hope it gives you a glimpse into this Negotiation CE. In my next article, I will write on the “Results Orientation” competence element.

If you are keen to know more about PMAS, you can check this link out https://pma.sg/ and follow my hashtag to learn more about the CE in IPMA Individual Competence Baseline (ICB) Version 4.0

#SGSunnyPM
#IPMA
#PMASingapore