Hard Skills In Project Management

INTRODUCTION

Last fall I took a course in project management. Together with my group we made a re-search paper about a global merger and how the project managers soft skills were part of making the project successful. During our research I understood the importance of the managers soft skills on the employee performance. The subject is interesting and has potential as a subject for my master’s thesis.

Today organizations are paying more attention on managers’ people skills. Historically in the field of project management so called hard skills have overruled the management behavioural. Lately research has focused on finding success factors of projects and it is recognized that soft skills are an important success factors in order for the project

Winter and Checkland (2003) supports the idea and note that hard para-digm has had a powerful impact for the development of the field. But what does the hard perspective mean in general? Pollack (2007) has researched the paradigms of pro-ject management. Hard and soft paradigms are important and recognized paradigms of the field. Hard paradigm is connected with quantitative techniques and is associated with fact oriented exactness and objective view. From this perspective project manage-ment is knowledge-based management where the manager is an expert in details. Effi-ciency, control of the team and results are paid highly

Good communication skills are defined as soft skills and have recognized to be a crucial impact for the project to succeed. Interesting is to notice that personality traits correlate to the success of projects. A group work of a merger included a project manager with personality type ENFJ. According to research this personality type was recognized as one of the most suitable types to be a project manager.

When considering a potential project manager there should be evaluation and focus on the personality of a person. Even though project manager needs to be willing to develop her leadership skills it is not guaranteed that training will shape everything. It is not pos-sible in every situation to think what to do. Therefore in tuff situations the real personal-ity might pop out.

A project manager has to understand that she should not know everything. A successful project manager understands that she has team who has different skills and knowledge that needs to be used to the highest potential. As Creasy et al. (2013) points out also for project managers there needs to be continuous training and