IT Project Management Success: the influence of project manager competencies and team commitment

Abstract

Information technology (IT) project success is a research topic that has received attention of academics and practitioners, at least, in the lasted two decades (Atkinson, 1999; Delone & Mclean, 2002). This topic is also relevant because organizations make increasing investments on IT to improve productivity and quality of processes (Assis, 2011). Despite all research and investments on the IT, the rate of failures on this kind of projects is high (The Standish Group, 2013). Two research questions drive this paper: (1) Do project manager competencies influence team commitment to the IT project success? (2) How can the project team’s commitment affect the success (or failure) of an IT project? In order to answer these questions, we did twelve in-depth interviews with IT project managers of different companies. The main findings show that IT professionals believe that soft skills are indeed more important to guarantee project success than technical skills. The interviewees also indicated that project managers who developed soft skills can coordinate their teams better and build commitment within team members. Full Paper PDF: http://www.contecsi.fea.usp.br/envio/11contecsi-files/papers/588/submission/director/588-2380-1-DR.pdf