ABSTRACT:

Many firms are outsourcing their information technology (IT) projects
to external vendors. Such projects can involve building new software
applications or maintaining existing applications. From the perspective
of both the vendor and the client, the allocation of the right person
to lead a project is very important. Poor project management can lead
to project failure and can also jeopardize client relationships. At the
same time, selecting the right person to lead an IT project is very
challenging, especially for large IT vendors who have access to a
myriad pool of talent and a divergence in projects.

In this study, we draw upon the literature on software project
management, IT human resource management and contingency theory, to
identify the types of skills needed for effective project management
and to develop a model matching project characteristics with project
managers’ skills and project outcomes. We consider two major types of
project manager (PM) skills: hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills
refer to a PM’s familiarity with the technical aspects of the project
including the domain, technology and methodology. We conceptualize soft
skills drawing on the work of Wagner and Sternberg on practical
intelligence, and use the critical incident methodology to assess PM’s
soft skills in managing and coordinating tasks, self, career, peers,
subordinates, superiors and clients. We hypothesize that higher levels
of soft and hard skills should have beneficial project outcomes, and
further theorize that higher levels of soft skills will be especially
beneficial in projects that are large, complex or uncertain, or where
there are low levels of team familiarity or client familiarity.

 

To evaluate our theoretical model, we collected and analyzed detailed
archival data on 530 IT projects from a leading IT vendor. We also
collected critical incidents from the 209 PMs leading the projects to
evaluate their levels of soft skills. Our findings indicate that, after
controlling for project characteristics, PM hard skills and experience,
and team attributes, PM soft skills have a significant favorable impact
on project outcomes, including project cost performance and client
satisfaction. This is an especially important finding in the case of IT
outsourcing projects, where both project costs and client satisfaction
can be important determinants of vendor projects and market share. We
also find that higher levels of PM hard skills improve project
performance but the impact is less than that of PM soft skills.
Finally, we find that higher levels of PM soft skills are especially
valuable for managing larger projects (in terms of team size and
project size) and when team familiarity and client familiarity are low.

 

This study contributes by identifying the project performance effects
of different kinds of PM skills. It is the first study to link PM soft
skills to project performance. Our research also extends contingency
theory in the context of IT projects by revealing the contingent
effects of soft skills for different kinds of IT projects.

BIO:

Professor Sandra A. Slaughter is a member of the information technology
management faculty in the College of Management at the Georgia
Institute of Technology and holds the Costley Chair.

Prior to her academic career, Sandra spent ten years working as an
IT analyst and project leader in companies including Hewlett-Packard,
the Allen-Bradley division of Rockwell International, and Square D
Corporation. Her research builds upon her practical experience in IT
and focuses on development productivity and quality issues and on
effective management of IT. Currently, she is conducting research on
open source software development, software process improvement,
capabilities and performance in IT outsourcing, and the compensation,
skills and careers of IT professionals.

Sandra has published more than eighty articles in leading research
journals, conference proceedings, and edited books and has received
eight best paper awards. Her research has been supported by grants from
the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Software Industry
Center, the Carnegie Bosch Institute, the Center for Analytical
Research on Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Quality
Leadership Center at the University of Minnesota. Professor Slaughter
currently serves as Departmental Editor for Management Science, and on
the Editorial Board of other journals.