I’m a firm believer in the importance of good communication on any project, and negotiation is a form of communication as well, isn’t it? It’s especially important when dealing with management - as they used to dealing with other in such a manner (for instance, haggling with a client for more budget funds) and therefor such a skill can greatly help us testers to get the resources we need to preform better testing, be it in form of more realistic deadlines, tools, testing environments, etc.
I’ve noticed that high-level reports work well to win over the top level management and to convince them of the importance of testing, so you can ask for more resources by trading information for it - such as succinct, often a visual representation, of the benefits testing brings and the improvements in the overall SDLC, in terms of incrementally increasing the automation coverage, re-testing bug-fixes, testing of new features.