PMP Practice: Root Cause Analysis of Vision Misunderstandings

When developing a shared vision, the project manager's role is to facilitate alignment among key stakeholders by finding common ground that supports the project's business objectives. The scenario provides a clear closing fact: the charter states the business objective requires both a safe/compliant device AND competitive advantage within 18 months—meaning both innovation and compliance are essential, not mutually exclusive. By facilitating a collaborative session with both VPs and the sponsor, Tomáš can build a unified vision that integrates both perspectives as complementary elements. This approach directly addresses the team's confusion by establishing a single, coherent direction that all stakeholders can support. A shared vision reduces conflict, clarifies priorities, and ensures all team members understand how their work contributes to the same goal.

**Why not A:** Deferring to the VP of Regulatory Affairs because compliance is mandatory creates a false hierarchy between the two priorities. The charter explicitly states the objective includes both safety and competitive advantage within 18 months, meaning innovation is equally essential to the project's business purpose.

**Why not B:** Creating two separate vision statements would institutionalize the very fragmentation causing team confusion. A project needs one unified vision that all team members can rally behind, not competing narratives tailored to different functional groups.

**Why not C:** Escalating to the sponsor to choose between the two executives' visions forces an unnecessary binary decision. The charter already establishes that both innovation and compliance are required, so the solution is integration through facilitated collaboration, not a top-down selection of one over the other.