Identifying key project management soft competencies at a telecommunication company.

• Date: 22 September 2012
• Author: Barna, Laszlo

1. INTRODUCTION

   Project management has been called both an art and a science. The necessary skills are common to both. There is no question that the best project managers are also outstanding leaders. They have vision, they motivate, they bring people together, and, most of all, they accomplish great things. These certain characteristics are consistently found on successful projects in every industry.(Verzuh 2008) The aim of my research is to identify the key soft project management competencies and furthermore to highlight those competencies which requires development in each case. In this part of my research I have asked project managers from the field of telecommunication and I made the evaluation based on their answers.

   A project manager applies knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. A project manager's job is essentially one of integration. It falls to a project manager to maintain equilibrium between the various project knowledge areas like Human Resource, Risk, Communications, Procurement, Scope, Time, Cost, & Quality and project processes like Initiating, Planning, Executing, Controlling, and Closing. (Gokhale 2005)

2. COMPETENCIES AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES

   Project management is a profession and a discipline where its participants or stakeholders are increasingly interested in the competency of its project managers. Most literatures relate project management competence to project management effectiveness and project success. Interest in project management competence stems from the very reasonable and widely held assumption that if people who manage and work on projects are competent, they will perform effectively and that this will lead to successful projects and successful organisations. (Crawford 1997)

   In my opinion the definition from Perry is an acceptable definition in terms of project managers, the reason I have chosen this definition is the fact he has published it in a project management related literature.

   So, he wrote that competency could be described as "a cluster of related knowledge, attitudes, skills and other personal characteristics that ...

   * Affects a major part of one's job

   * Correlates with performance on the job

   * Can be measured against well-accepted standards

   * Can be improved via training and development"(Parry 1998)

   A competency is what a successful employee must be able to do to accomplish desired results on a job. Competencies are built up over time and are not innate. It typically takes experience on the job to build competencies. Knowledge, Skills and Abilities, by contrast, might be brought into the job by entry-level employees

   After examining several types of competency models, systems and groupings (Gorog, 2007), PMBOK (2011), Pinto (2009) I have decided to use the following partition. In the next figure is the used classification of the project management...