Negotiation Process from a Systems Perspective

Systems engineering covers a wide range of activities, which require know-how transmission between people and disciplines working in different domains. Negotiation is mentioned as one of these activities, in (IS/IEC 15288) and is essential to the overall system engineering process. It can also occur as a result of specific project organization issues, between different departments or organizations, negotiation between stakeholders for contradictory requirements, allocation of internal tasks in large organizations, system design trade-offs etc.. The lack of a thorough description of the negotiation process, as well as its complexity, that results from the wide range of possible scenarios, richness and uncertainty of the contextual information, diverse human behavior, leaves its organization and implementation to the preference of the systems engineer or program manager. Conflict situations, decisions shared between multiple actors, acquisitions in systems engineering, are all resolved through negotiation and the use of laws, rules and process formalization. We believe that a system approach can greatly improve understanding of the potential scenarios and the relation to constraints coming from within and outside the group, to the objectives of each actor, as well as to decisions taken inside the group in the course of the negotiation process. It also facilitates achieving an optimal outcome of the negotiation process in relation to the purpose of each participant. In this paper we analyze the negotiation process from a system’s perspective by defining a framework for analysis and optimal resolution of a given negotiation case. We propose a general interpretation that is compatible with formalized processes meant to close deals between different actors.