Managing Conflicts in IT Projects in Brazilian Companies

IT projects have assumed an important role in nowadays turbulent competitive scenario. Meanwhile, project management has been another important issue for implementing strategies that enable companies to face the menacing competition. This paper intends to identify the main sources of conflicts in IT projects, as well as the most common practices to solve them. This study was performed considering the different stages of development life cycle. There are five macro-strategies used for solving these conflicts: withdrawal, smoothing, forcing, compromise and problem solving. The concept of waterfall model for software developing process was also used. Although this model presents several limitations, it was chosen for this study due to its large adoption in the Brazilian companies´ context. This life cycle model presents the following phases: analysis, design, coding, testing, implementation and maintenance. The adopted methodological approach was a survey among IT professionals. The research was performed through self fulfilled questionnaires sent by e-mail or answered in an Internet Web site. The answers were evaluated in order to eliminate some problematic cases. The valid answers were analyzed through statistical tools