PMP Practice: Identify and Analyze Conflict Sources

Rio Fontaine-Baptiste is leading a nine-month regulatory compliance project for Churro Lightning Co, a shipping company implementing new customs tracking systems across 12 distribution centers. The project follows a detailed Gantt chart with dependencies across legal, IT, and operations teams. Two weeks ago, the operations director insisted on adding real-time dashboards not in the approved scope, while the IT manager argues this would require rearchitecting the database layer and delay the mandatory compliance deadline by six weeks. Both leaders have stopped attending joint planning sessions and are now communicating only through their respective team members, creating confusion about priorities. The project charter clearly defines the compliance deadline as non-negotiable due to regulatory penalties. What should Rio do to address this conflict?