Project Managers’ Competence Identification

Author(s):  
Heli Aramo-Immonen ◽  
Andrea Bikfalvi ◽  
Núria Mancebo ◽  
Hannu Vanharanta

The objective of this article is to help align higher education of future project managers to the contemporary requirements of global project business. The perspective is project managers’ competencies in knowledge intensive industry, such as in IT branch. In this paper, it is considered that a holistic view of competence self-evaluation helps to assess the current intentional change. The system introduced supports decision making by measuring and capturing the actual drivers designed specifically for the role of project manager. Generalizing the competence identification process appears to be more constructive than detailing about competence content itself. This study brings valuable and novel empirical data using a sample of students acting as project managers in Spain and a sample of experienced project managers from Finland. A number of possible future studies using the same experimental set up are apparent.

Author(s):  
Heli Aramo-Immonen ◽  
Andrea Bikfalvi ◽  
Núria Mancebo ◽  
Hannu Vanharanta

The objective of this article is to help align higher education of future project managers to the contemporary requirements of global project business. The perspective is project managers’ competencies in knowledge intensive industry, such as in IT branch. In this paper, it is considered that a holistic view of competence self-evaluation helps to assess the current intentional change. The system introduced supports decision making by measuring and capturing the actual drivers designed specifically for the role of project manager. Generalizing the competence identification process appears to be more constructive than detailing about competence content itself. This study brings valuable and novel empirical data using a sample of students acting as project managers in Spain and a sample of experienced project managers from Finland. A number of possible future studies using the same experimental set up are apparent.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (23) ◽  
pp. 12999
Author(s):  
Marcin Wyskwarski

The growing number of projects and the key role of project managers in their implementation makes the competencies of managers a subject of many studies. An attempt can be made to determine the project manager competencies that employers appreciate the most through analyses of job advertisements. Due to a very large number of job advertisements, it may be difficult or even impossible to analyze their content manually. A solution may be to fetch and process job advertisements automatically. The main purpose of this paper was to identify the project manager competencies that are the most desired by employers. An analysis of job advertisements was performed to identify the project manager competencies required by employers. Job advertisements were automatically downloaded from online job boards. Fragments of job advertisements that described requirements were analyzed with text mining. The analysis included preprocessing, building of corpora of documents, construction of document-term matrices, application of traditional data mining methods, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is a popular topic modeling algorithm. After the initial text processing (all characters except letters were removed, uppercase letters were converted to lowercase letters, words deemed useless were removed, and words were converted to their basic form), n-grams were built, and topics identified with LDA were generated. The most frequently used words and n-grams, along with the identified topics, were graphically represented. The meanings of the words and sentences were not analyzed in the text mining analysis of the job advertisements. The analysis did not take into account whether the words appeared side by side in the document-except for the intentional creation of n-grams (such as “communication skill”). The analysis, however, facilitated the identification of certain patterns and regularities in the occurrence of specific strings in the documents (fragments of advertisements describing the requirements). The interpretation of the results is based on the frequency of words and n-grams and frequency of words in topics identified by the LDA algorithm. This paper contributes to science by showing that text mining of job offers can, to some extent, help determine project manager competencies in demand. The method can be used by organizations training future project managers to modify and better adapt curricula to the needs of the labor market. It can be used to monitor the current trends in project manager requirements as well.


Author(s):  
Céline M. Silvius ◽  
Gilbert Silvius

Mobile devices and applications are changing the way individuals gather, process and share information. A development which also applies to project management. This chapter reports an explorative study on the functionality of 50 project management apps. The apps were analyzed on the variables: type of functionality, project management processes supported, methodology/standard supported, topics covered, website support, languages supported, project roles supported, number of team members supported and number of projects supported. Our analysis showed that the functionality of project management apps today is mainly focused on two application areas: (A) Supporting the role of the project manager individually in the planning/organizing processes of the project and (B) Supporting team communication and team collaboration. Lacking in functionality seems to be the communication/collaboration with project sponsor and other stakeholders. Based on our study we recommend project managers to be selective when starting to use project management apps.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 6537
Author(s):  
Jian Xue ◽  
Zeeshan Rasool ◽  
Aqsa Gillani ◽  
Ahmad Imran Khan

The current study suggests a different and innovative view by testing a unique combination of variables, which are unproven in a single model for the purpose of increasing the ratio of sustainable projects. The project manager can use the model to look their projects and can compose necessary changes for better outcomes. The study objects to postulate the competence breach of project managers with regard to sustainability, and to deliver direction that how to fulfill the research gap. The given work is centered on the result of project supervisor soft capabilities on project sustainability mediated by innovation. To achieve this aim, deductive approach was adopted. The sample size of the study was 242 respondents, and data were collected from software houses. The collected data were then analyzed by doing the structural equation modeling in PLS-SEM in order to examine the relationships. The outcomes demonstrate positive impact of project manager soft competences on project sustainability and mediating impact of innovation among the relationship of project manager soft competences and project sustainability. Innovation is directly linked to project sustainable development, and was accepted, which aligns with the previous studies. This research reflects the role of project manager soft competences on innovation and project sustainability. The study is unique in its scope and implications as the focus is upon empirical investigation of the project manager soft competences and project sustainability in the context of Pakistan.


Author(s):  
DANUPOL HOONSOPON ◽  
WILERT PURIWAT

Existing theories of organisational behaviour have addressed the relationship between the role of leadership behaviour of project manager and outcomes of subordinates in developing new products (e.g., improving innovation speed and new product performance). However, only a small number of researchers have investigated the impact of leadership behaviour on the fuzzy front end. Specifically, the role of leadership behaviour in reducing uncertainty in the fuzzy front end for each innovation type has been largely overlooked. Apart from employing the path-goal theory and using survey research, this research collects data from the food & beverage, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology industries in Thailand ([Formula: see text]) and analyses the data with structural equation modeling. Our results can contribute how the leadership behaviour of project manager impacts on development of each type of product innovation. The findings reveal that the directive path-goal behaviour of project managers helps to reduce uncertainty in the fuzzy front end during incremental innovation development. In contrast, achievement-oriented behaviour of project managers helps to reduce uncertainty in the fuzzy front end during radical innovation development. Additionally, reducing uncertainty in the fuzzy front end can enhance the new product performance of these two types of innovation.


2016 ◽  
pp. 579-593
Author(s):  
Céline M. Silvius ◽  
Gilbert Silvius

Mobile devices and applications are changing the way individuals gather, process and share information. A development which also applies to project management. This chapter reports an explorative study on the functionality of 50 project management apps. The apps were analyzed on the variables: type of functionality, project management processes supported, methodology/standard supported, topics covered, website support, languages supported, project roles supported, number of team members supported and number of projects supported. Our analysis showed that the functionality of project management apps today is mainly focused on two application areas: (A) Supporting the role of the project manager individually in the planning/organizing processes of the project and (B) Supporting team communication and team collaboration. Lacking in functionality seems to be the communication/collaboration with project sponsor and other stakeholders. Based on our study we recommend project managers to be selective when starting to use project management apps.


Author(s):  
Gilman C. K. Tam

In the two decades since the Earth Summit in 1992, an increasing number of projects have built sustainability considerations into project design and implementation. Project managers without knowledge and guidance on sustainability assessment would find it difficult to drive projects and programs contributing towards a sustainable society. The purpose of this chapter is to devise an assessment tool for project managers incorporating the concept of pillar-based and principles-based sustainability approaches as well as the EIA-driven and objectives-led assessment methodologies. The definitions of sustainability in project management and program management are discussed as basis for the establishment of sustainability evaluation framework. The views of project management community regarding the role of project manager in handling project related sustainability activities are discussed. This chapter contributes to devising a practical assessment tool for project managers in managing project sustainability.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (25) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Jacques De Vos Malan

An increasing proportion of research projects are interdisciplinary or even trans-disciplinary in nature, particularly in the case of research directed at addressing the ‘wicked’ problems that arise in public policy-making. Transdisciplinary work is complex, contestable, often culture-specific and messy. In these projects, the role of the research project manager, as facilitator and intermediary, often becomes crucial. An experienced transdisciplinary project manager will play an important function as a member of the leadership group, bridging and translating between the various disciplinary stakeholders, holding together the conceptual and practical elements of the project. This paper examines four of the specialised skills required of transdisciplinary project managers: the capacity for rigorous scoping; the development of a collaborative culture; familiarity with serious and pervasive ambiguity; and a clear understanding of target audiences. The findings draw on practical experience gained by the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) research management team, through the delivery of the program Securing Australia’s Future, between 2012 and 2016.


2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vittal S. Anantatmula

Technology assumes importance in the context of project management due to greater challenges in today's technology-enabled work environment, where technology tools are routinely used for colaboration, communication, and dep oyment of project management practices. It is becoming common practice for even co-located project teams to use the electronic medium for these purposes. Notwithstanding the importance of technology, research has shown that it is difficult to associate the use of technology with business performance and the absence of such relation can be extrapolated to project performance as well. However, technology can play a major role in supporting project managers in managing projects effectively and efficiently. Several studies have addressed the importance and leadership style of project managers. However, specific roles and responsibilities of a project manager toward the project team is an area that needs further study. In this research effort, using the literature review, important people-related factors of project performance are identified. Then structured personal interviews were used to gather data for understanding relations among these factors in order to develop a project manager performance model. The model was developed employing the interpretive structural modeling(ISM) methodology. The model was used to determine the role of the project manager in managing the project team and improving the project performance. Results show that both leadership and management roles are important. This study helped to analyze underlying interactions among these factors and, consequently, understand the supportive function of technology to the project manager in improving project performance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 266 ◽  
pp. 01011
Author(s):  
Noorul Adharina Zulkiffli ◽  
Aryani Ahmad Latiffi

Project managers have played a vital role in sustainable construction projects by integrating the concept of sustainability into their practices. The role of project manager is important in all phases of sustainable construction projects but especially in the pre-construction phase when the greatest challenges that require their involvement occur. This requires project managers to have effective leadership skills to think a project through and remain focused on the end goal. Thus, the aim of this paper is to identify the project manager’s leadership skills in the pre-construction phase of sustainable construction projects. A key significant contribution of this paper is the literature review of journals and books on project manager’s leadership skills when engaged in sustainable construction projects. The overall intent is to highlight and identify the leadership skills of project managers in the pre-construction phase of sustainable construction projects so that the values and benefits of these skills can be adapted in current practices to successfully deliver such projects.


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