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Majority of products and services in today's technologically advanced and global world is developed in form of projects. ICT (information and communication technology) research and practice confirm that success of those projects depends on three equivocally relevant areas: technology, management process and people. The last, as proven in numerous surveys and research, is the main cause of failure and challenge of the ICT projects. Project manager skills to handle humans are essential to those endeavours. This paper examines trends in required soft skills for ICT project managers, reflecting state-ofthe-art in the field. The skills identiϐied in a careful survey of 219 job advertisements for ICT project managers in Switzerland, Poland and Thailand are compared with the soft skills identiϐied in 27 journal and conference publications as well as further 46 monographs and standards on project management. For evaluation purpose authors adopted the L-Timer™ process based mental model of project management. Whereas science considers leadership skills and communication capabilities as most important one, practice calls for communication and leadership in reverse sequence, followed by the team management, first. The processes of Human Resource, Conflict and Self Management are underrepresented in the advertisements. While Switzerland represents weighted approach, Poland focuses on team management capability, while Thailand demands leadership qualities of prospective project managers. The cultural roots evaluation and inter-cultural differences reflected by the conclusions of this paper are further research objectives of the authors.

The paper compares the statistical description of physical-metallurgical processes and ceramic-polycrystalline evolutions, termed the normal grain growth (NGG), as adopted to soft-and chemically-reactive grains, with a Smoluchowski's population-constant kernel cluster-cluster aggregation (CCA) model, concerning irreversible chemical reaction kinetics. The former aiming at comprehending, in a semi-quantitative way, the volumeconservative (pressure-drifted) grain-growth process which we propose to adopt for hydrogel systems at quite low temperature (near a gel point). It has been noticed, that by identifying the mean cluster size < k > from the Smoluchowski CCA description with the mean cluster radius' size RD, from the NGG approach of proximate grains, one is able to embark on equivalence of both frameworks, but only under certain conditions. For great enough, close-packed clusters, the equivalence can be obtained by rearranging the time domain with rescaled time variable, where the scaling function originates from the dispersive (long-tail, or fractal) kinetics, with a single exponent equal to d+1 (in d-dimensional (Euclidean) space). This can be of interest for experimenters, working in the field of thermoresponsive gels formation, where crystalline structural predispositions overwhelm.