Project: Successful Strategies

This week read the More Meetings and Cost Estimate Negotiations and Problems Executing the Project section of the case study provided in W1 Project Instructions. Also review all discussion questions provided at the end of the case study document.
Based on the assigned sections (and all previous assigned sections of the case study), address the following topics:

· Overcoming Resource Disadvantage

o What tactics can a financially disadvantaged negotiator use to be treated on par with large organizations when their assets and resources are not as large?

o How might Infosys have used such tactics in the case study?

· Using Resource Application

o How can an effective negotiator use resource application in terms of written material, appropriate gifts, time expectations, and political or economic considerations such as innovation and risk to “even the playing field”?

o How might Infosys have used such resource application?

· Strategies for Negotiation Stages

o Negotiation can often be divided into four stages including preparation, information exchange, bargaining, and closure. Defend action steps Infosys should have taken in each stage of the negotiation case study.

· Non-Winner Perceptions

o In a negotiation, it is a good strategy to establish that no one is a loser in a negotiated outcome.

o Assess the future consequences that might arise when someone leaves the negotiation table feeling that he or she is a non-winner.

o Assess how the no one is a loser perspective does or does not impact the case study.

· Final Recommendations

o Justify at least five recommendations for creating positive outcomes in the case. In essence, when taking all your work in the case study to date into consideration, what are the five best practices or action steps you would suggest if you were asked to consult with the parties in the case study?

Important hint: You might find it helpful to begin each section of the paper by discussing the key themes and cues you observe. Then, do research on those key themes to both broaden and deepen your evaluation of the case and your understanding of the important issues. In the final product, about half your written evaluation of each topic should be research. About half should be application to the case study.

Recommendation for the level one heading for the body of your paper:

Overcoming Resource Disadvantage
Using Resource Application
Successful Strategies for Each Negotiation Stage

Implications for Creating Non-Winner Perceptions

Submission Details:

· Submit your evaluation in a six-page paper

CASE STUDY

More Meetings and Cost Estimate Negotiations After several more meetings and more preparation, Infosys submitted a cost estimate of $220,000. NTC requested a price reduction, since the total cost was almost 50 percent more than NISP’s competing proposal. Infosys objected but ultimately reduced the price by 20 percent. NTC also requested that the time be cut from 16 weeks to 14 weeks. Although doing so would require overlapping the design and coding phases of the project, Infosys agreed to the time reduction.

Problems Executing the Project In the course of development, NTC invited end users to test the system and entered the issues these users raised into the tracking system. Sachin thought most of the end-user issues were cosmetic, since they did not block the users from using the system. However, there were far more issues than Sachin had anticipated. Fixing them all would adversely affect the cost of the project or the schedule or both. Sachin told this to his NTC counterpart, trying to make the point that NTC should have frozen the requirements when the contract was agreed to. NTC’s response was that Infosys had been doing what it wanted to do without really knowing what NTC wanted. NTC also said that no delay in delivery was acceptable because NTC was already advertising the new VoIP service. NTC refused to pay extra for the new work associated with solving the end-user issues.

Discussion Questions 1. What did you notice about the way the opportunity for this project came about that was an unusual business practice for Infosys? 2. Describe the contract negotiations. In what way were these negotiations a departure from the way you would have expected negotiations to be conducted? 3. Why do you suppose NTC accepted Infosys’s 20 percent reduction, which still made its proposal more expensive than the other vendor’s? 4. Shouldn’t Infosys have asked for something in return for reducing its price? What might Infosys have asked for? 5. Once NTC got a price reduction, it asked for a two-week time reduction. Infosys agreed to that, too. Who was Infosys negotiating with? What should Infosys have done at this stage of the negotiation? Page 3 of 3 LEA6185_International Negotiations © 2009 South University 6. Communication during the meetings to develop specifications was difficult. Is there anything that Infosys could have done to facilitate communication, reduce the transaction costs associated with developing the bid, and minimize conflict once the project was launched? Keep in mind that translation in Japan is expensive. 7. When Sachin tried to make the point that NTC should have frozen the requirements when the contract was agreed to, NTC responded that Infosys did what it wanted to do without really knowing what NTC wanted. What might have led to this response? 8. Should Sachin have gone out for drinks with Yoneyama-san and the NTC engineer? Did Sachin need to drink alcohol?