Stakeholders in excellence in teaching and learning of project management

Tackling Project Management Competence Research

The vast amount of previous research on project management competence does not provide a basis for educational needs. Analyzing previous research poses two challenges: the lack of a uniform list of competences, necessitating a taxonomy, and the use of importance as a criterion, favoring general important competences. Criticality is introduced as the competence a project manager adds to the team. Validation research using criticality and the taxonomy among experienced Dutch project managers is more comprehensive and provides a lesser focus on general important competences than previous research. Criticality focuses more on the essence of the profession.

Applying a Core Competence Model on Swedish Job Advertisements for IT Project Managers

Recruitments of IT project managers are costly and time-consuming, which makes it important to handle them effectively. IT project managers' key function in IT projects conveys that the prerequisites in such job ads become extensive and hard to satisfy because of overloaded descriptions. The organization's core competence (henceforth CC) requirements need to be decisive and explicitly expressed. Hence, each recruitment process should involve the defining of what the CC qualifications are. Advertisements were collected (2010-2013) and a CC lens was tested for assessment of CC criteria in order to get an indication of its value. The study's practical implication is an added understanding of the importance to discern what core competence/-s a specific project requires and furthermore to match those with the job requirements during the recruitment process. The implication for research is an inspiration for further development of methods for determining core competence criteria for recruiting IT-project managers.

Evidence-Based Scope for Reducing “Fire-Fighting” in Project Management

This paper reviews the problems of project management as reported by 1,879 individuals employed in the construction, manufacturing, process, and service industries in North-West Europe over 23 years. Data obtained by a written questionnaire confirms that organizational relationships need the most attention. The data exhibits no trends over the 23 years. It indicates that many of the problems of project management are “institutional”; in other words, they are due to organizational cultures rather than inherent in project work. The evidence supports the view that poor discipline at the front-end of projects results in too much “fire-fighting” in project execution to overcome problems that could have been prevented. Prevention of these institutional problems requires action at the level of corporate governance, above the level of project management.

The Criticality of Transferable Skills Development and Virtual Learning Environments Used in the Teaching of Project Management

Studies have found the development of transferable skills and the provision of virtual learning environments (VLEs) to be crucial to students who are learning project management. Taking these factors into consideration, this article explores why project management students have emphasized the importance of these two critical learning and teaching parameters in their developmental needs. The study was conducted utilizing focus groups consisting of 88 students in a UK higher education institution. Overall, we found the existence of five critical and applied themes grouped against transferable skills and the provision of VLEs under which students’ needs could be classified.

An Analysis of Interrelationships between Project Management and Student-Experience Constructs

This article seeks to explore, through the utilization of correlational analysis, how the parameters that impact the student experience may be interrelated. We found that the experiences of students studying project management appear to be heavily influenced by e-resource provisions and the actual experiences that the students are subjected to when using virtual learning environments (VLEs). These findings support previous research acknowledging that information and communications technology (ICT) plays an important role in teaching and learning project management. Students’ experience of interpersonal skills also correlated uniquely and significantly with other constructs, supporting the premise that learning is integral to the development of interpersonal skills. Discussion surrounds the interdependency of student experiences adding to their learning and how future research should consider larger and more diverse samples to establish exactly what constructs detract and/or add to their learning in project management, which could then contribute to pedagogical discourse in other disciplines.