The Behavior Antagonism in the IT Project Management

The article is concerned with the proposed method of analyzing proposals from team members with the aim to avoid conflict situations at the team formation stage. The designed method is based on the matrix game theory. Conflicts between separate team members mainly appear at the team formation stage. For a project manager, it is essential to detect a conflict situation in proper time and to find a way out of it to the satisfaction of the both team members and without harm to the teamwork in general. A team created for implementation of an IT project often encounters a situation when two of its members have a different vision of approaches to the final product creation. In this case, each of them has a big experience in developing similar software products or services in different teams. For efficient solution of the said situation, we propose to use approaches being typical for bimatrix games when each of these team members is treated as a player. The matrix game theory was formed on a conflict of two players with purely opposite interests – an antagonistic game with a zero sum. With assumption that the conditional benefit of using other proposals is equal to zero, the team of developers would gain an additional positive benefit subject to using the proposal of the first player enabling adoption of the experience of the previous team of developers who worked at the same company. We used special calculations for taking the optimum decision and gaining the greatest benefit. In the real life, conflict situations use to appear much more frequently, in which the interests of the players are not opposite any more, although not coinciding. At the same time, account is taken of the fact that the bimatrix game theory is based on a conflict of two players whose interests are opposite – an antagonistic game with a zero sum being that very element to constitute the basis of the approach developed.