Degree

Master of Business Administration Executive

Faculty / School

Faculty of Business Administration (FBA)

Year of Award

2021

Project Type

MBA Executive Research Project

Access Type

Restricted Access

Executive Summary

IS Project Manager’s Soft Competencies are the set of skills that are required by PM to successfully complete its project and able to achieve iron triangle. It might be possible that PM with no or very low set of soft competencies can close some project successful, but PM with IS PM soft competencies have higher probability of successful IS project.

Soft competencies are categories into competency group name Communication, Negotiation Skills, Professionalism, General/Project Management Skills, Social Skills and Leadership. Each group has set of multiple competencies. For the sake of clarity, we are listing Communication group, it comprises of Effective Questioning/Generating Feedback, Collaborate, Listening Skills, Open Communication, Presentation Skills, Writing Skills and Verbal Skills. Competency group and competencies are already compiled by (Skulmoski and Hartman, 2010). We are doing the extension of their research for Pakistan.

Our research focus is to find the most important soft competencies required for Information Systems Project Manager in Pakistan. Our research comprises of three main instruments literature review, questionnaire (30 samples) and interview (3 panelist). We have adopted the questionnaire from (Skulmoski and Hartman, 2010) who use it with Canadian research participants.

Once we have compiled all the research participants data, we have compiled and get the opinion of three of our interview panelists. Who help us in interpreting the results and analyzed it in comparison with Canadian research results. In addition to this we get response of few of our research questions from them. With secondary research we also get the results of two of our research objectives.

Research shows that most commonly identified soft competencies are Consensus Building ,Effective Questioning/Generating Feedback, Vision-Oriented/Articulate the Business Problem, Truthful/Honest, Listening Skills, Negotiation/Facilitation Skills, Participate and Contribute Fully, Results-Oriented, Project Management Skills and Knowledge, Ability to Get Along/Team Player ,Open Communication, Technical Skills/Theoretical Knowledge, Writing Skills, Share—Information and Credit ,Manage Expectations

Analyzing Pakistan questionnaire results with Canada we found the overall it’s 67%, 10 out of 15 competencies are matched. If we compare it phase-wise, Initiation 60%, Planning 67%, Implementation 67% matched.

In our research we found the following order and count of competency groups’ competencies appeared in top five. Communication 5 times, Negotiation Skills 4 times, Professionalism 3 times, General/Project Management Skills 3 times, Social Skills 3 times and Leadership 2 times.

Research also found Consensus Building, Effective Questioning/Generating Feedback, Vision-Oriented/Articulate the Business Problem, Truthful/Honest in top 4 competencies.

Research also find that Manager need some additional traits to become a leader or in other word to become a Project Manager, we also found that leader have almost the same attributes what is expected from project manager. Leader should have follower-ship, ability to inspire follower-ship, believe that people are most important, getting along the team, self-improvement, good communication and decision making.

Literature review have no clear boundary to identify which competencies can be developed and which one are innate, however we found sufficient literature about the learning of those traits that are commonly considered as innate, e.g leadership. Literature also have good number of discussions on how to developed those soft skills. Researchers emphasized that mentor ship, experimental approach to learning and practice would surely help in gaining and improving any of soft competencies.

Pages

50

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