A survey Cutter conducted (in November 2004) of 110 end-user organizations' business performance management practices indicates that more than one-quarter are providing proactive alerting capabilities for use with their business performance management solutions.

[Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the Cutter IT Journal . We are rerunning it here because of its relevance to IT professionals worldwide.]

Negotiations are not typically won or lost during the negotiating event itself, but rather during the preparation phase that precedes it. Preparation brings you self-confidence as a negotiator that can help you overcome many of the challenges you face. Here are five essential questions you need to consider during the preparation phase:

A survey we conducted in November 2004 of end-user organizations undertaking business performance management initiatives found that almost half were required to make changes to existing business processes in order to support implementing their business performance management solutions.

Q. Tell me about an interesting consulting engagement you were involved in.

In this interview, Michael Mah addresses the importance of negotiation skills for today's IT manager. He touched upon this point in his Executive Report, " The Making of the Agile IT Executive."

Q: How did you get into the field of negotiation?

I've been writing on objects, components, and distributed component systems for a decade. In the course of that decade, I've watched objects evolve from a commercially new technology to the established way of developing software.

Even as we're in the midst of the rapid growth of Wi-Fi and 2.5G and 3G wireless data networking, we're already hearing about "the next big thing" in broadband and wireless networking: WiMAX and IEEE 802.20.

Often the executive board arrives at the conclusion that offshoring will result in improved quality or reduced costs -- or even both -- and mandates that the development of a system take place elsewhere. Yet project managers and technical staff of offshoring projects do not receive management support when it comes to making the project a success.

Most formal system development methodologies are focused on successful development and implementation of IT systems. Very few, if any, address the issue of how to discontinue failing or failed IT projects! It is almost as if the IT community considers it sacrilegious to acknowledge, let alone terminate, a failed or failing project.