The Impact of Project Manager’s Skills and Age on Project Success

Abstract

Goal: This study seeks to examine project success in relation to project managers' factors. Pertaining to research questions, we highlighted: "do project manager's technical, conceptual, political and human skills are significantly related to project success?, and does project manager's age play a significant role in achieving project success? Design / Methodology / Approach: This research employed a quantitative research method using survey questionnaires to collect data from 400 project managers working in five well-known construction companies in Cairo, Egypt. Descriptive statistics using Relative Importance Index (RII) were employed to rank the dimensions of project manager's skills: conceptual, technical, human and political skills; and project success dimensions: cost, schedule and quality. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify the impact of project managers' skills on project success while simple linear regression was used to examine the relationship between project manager's age and project success Results: The results of RII revealed that project managers maintain a competitive level of technical, conceptual, political and human skills, and emphasize on specific aspects of cost, schedule, and quality dimensions of project success. The regression analysis revealed that 49.2% of the explained variation in project success can be accounted for technical, political, human and conceptual skills at coefficient of determination values of 0.611, 0.506, 0.431 and 0.407 respectively while the project manager's age had no association with project success with a P value 0.694 at alpha level of 0.05. Limitations of the investigation:Generalizing research findings might be challenged because sample size was randomly selected due lack of identifying the exact size target population. Practical implications:The managerial implication of this study lies in the need for construction companies not to consider project manager's age as a significant factor for project success, instead they need to ensure that project managers possess a competitive level of conceptual, technical, political and human skills.Originality / Value: Pertaining to contribution to academia, this research argues that project success subject to a set of comprehensive set of project managerial skills namely conceptual, technical, political and human. Further, it is essential to distinguish between project manager's age and experience and not to consider project manager's age as a determinant of a project success.

Critical success factors in Software Development Projects

“…Software development projects are complex in nature and if not managed properly, will not meet business needs (Vavpotic et al, 2022). Software development is one fundamental activity whereby the software is designed and programmed (Elmezain et al, 2021). The common tasks performed during software development are requirements gathering and specification, design, code or unit test, integration and test and user support, and problem-fix (Davis, 2013;Tsui et al, 2014).…”

“…The common tasks performed during software development are requirements gathering and specification, design, code or unit test, integration and test and user support, and problem-fix (Davis, 2013;Tsui et al, 2014). In the Waterfall model, the tasks are organised in sequence, whereas in the Agile software model they are interleaved (Elmezain et al, 2021). The Agile approach is contrary to the Waterfall approach since it incorporates changes of requirements at any time (Beerbaum, 2021).…”

“…Organisations are prone to combine the Waterfall and Agile methods (C. . Also other customers who are familiar with Waterfall plans may find it difficult to engage in an agile planning process (Elmezain et al, 2021). In 2015, Vijayasarathy https://doi.org/10.18489/sacj.v34i1.820 and Butler (2015) reported that organisations are using more than one methodology on their projects and the traditional methodologies are still popular.…”

“…Research by Theocharis et al (2015) emphasises mixing both Waterfall and Scrum to reap the benefits. The choice of software development methodology depends on what the customer prefers and the environment where the software will be used, and also depends on the type of software under development (Elmezain et al, 2021). The FBI had evolved into software development and quickly adopted agile software development methods (Fulgham et al, 2011).…”

“…Also, many organisations rely on projects they run in order to sustain business every day (Elmezain et al, 2021) -without projects some organisations will not operate. The information sources and statistics that travel faster to the media were developed by software developers following any software development method, including open source.…”