The Development of a Taxonomy of Desired Personal Qualities for IT Project Team Members and Its Use in an Educational Setting

Abstract

Although much literature exists on desired qualities of team leaders of IT projects and even desired components of the team, there is a paucity of literature on the desired personal qualities of individuals working within team settings. This research set out to empirically investigate the personal qualities which students believe would be desirable in IT project team members. An initial attempt to create a taxonomy of desired personal qualities was made using feedback from two groups of students; undergraduate and graduate students who had completed an IT project management (ITPM) course. The students were asked, as part of a major group assignment, to give the personal qualities that they would want in project team members if they were a project manager. This topic had not been explicitly covered in their course, though there had been an underlying emphasis on the importance of 'soft skills'.From reading the students' responses, a taxonomy that varied along two main dimensions was developed; first, whether the named quality related specifically to the work environment or whether the quality was one that would be relevant to many aspects of life, and second, whether or not the quality relied on interaction with others and thus whether it was better described as personal or interpersonal. Further, a division was made concerning whether the quality was more a characteristic of a person, called a trait here, or a skill.After the initial taxonomy was developed, it was applied to a different set of students. This new group of students had recently completed a third level, year long, group IT project for external clients. These students, who were from a different university from the first two groups of students, were asked, via email, to give the personal qualities they would want in project team members. From reading the responses, it was apparent that the taxonomy needed to be extended by adding a new dimension, 'values', which would include qualities like honest and hard-working.This new dimension thus allowed a distinction to be made between qualities that reflected a person's values and those that did not, like being cooperative or fun-loving. 'real world' experiences of team work, students may be confronted to an unrealistic degree with poor work ethics of fellow team members, thus leading to a perspective where work values are paramount. Interestingly, while the ITPM course had placed an emphasis on 'soft skills', the undergraduate ITPM students gave less emphasis to interpersonal qualities than graduate students. It may be that the work experience of graduate students has allowed them to see the importance of interpersonal skills. Though initially not concerned with the effects of different methods of educating future IT Project members, our findings give some insight into such educational issues.

Framework integrating multiple dimensions of competency and related pedagogies: A case for IT Industry

“…Team Size: 20-40 trainees in each team 2. Use cases executed by each trainee: [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] The representative samples are given in table 2 and 3. The results have led to the conclusions that 1.…”

Swedish IT Project Managers' Personality Traits Mirrored in the Big Five

“…Creasy and Anantatmula (2013) found positive relationship between personality dimensions and project success. Jewels and Ford (2006) developed the taxonomy of desired personal qualities for team members; the taxonomy also highlights the fact that different teams could perfectly well desire different personal qualities. A person's personality influences a wide range of work-related variables (Robertson & Callinan, 1998) and the single most important key attribute for project managers is known to be administrative ability.…”

THE PREDICTORS OF SUCCESS FOR E-LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS (HEIs) IN N-W.F.P, PAKISTAN

“…A research from universities by Lewis & Goodison (2004), reveals that those who were running successful eLearning-initiatives, strongly perceived that the -developments needed to be driven by pedagogy, not the technology.‖ Likewise, data on eLearning experiences in developed and developing countries provide enough evidence to understand that it is not technology (Jewels & Ford, 2006) rather human and cultural issues which can either work as critical success factors or turn into critical failure variables. For example, culture is a highly influential mediator in the present educational environments wherein pedagogical models are an integral part of the culture of every institute (Nyvang, 2006).…”