PICMET @ Newsletter   
                                January, 2004, Vol.1 Number 1                           

Project requirements

After knowing the strategic importance of projects to the organization, we should know the projects’ requirements, and then they can be assigned to appropriate project managers.  Usually, project requirements are based on project characteristics.  From our study, we found that some companies in high velocity industries regard project requirements as the level of risk associated with projects, degree of schedule criticality, degree of organizational complexity, degree of task complexity, and level of technology novelty.

To be used for project manager assignments, these requirements should be translated into the level of project manager competencies that each project needs from its project manager (discussed in the next section).  For example, if a project has a high risk level, it needs a project manager who is very competent in risk management.

Competencies of project managers               

 Competencies of project managers are the important criteria for project manager assignments.  From our study we found that to meet the needs of projects, project managers should be experts in administrative/process competencies, namely monitoring/control, risk management, planning/scheduling, and resource management, with an understanding of the company’s project management process.  The second important group of competencies is interpersonal competencies, which include leadership, communication, team management, conflict management, and problem solving.  The next group includes competencies regarding business/strategic elements: business sense, customer concern, integrative capability, strategic thinking, and profit/cost consciousness.  Intrapersonal competencies are also important.  A project manager should be organized and disciplined, responsible, proactive and ambitious, mature and self-controlled, and flexible.  Last in the group are technical competencies.  Project managers are not required to have technical expertise but should have knowledge of product applications and of technology and trends.

 These competencies can be used to evaluate the required competencies (the level of competencies that each project needs) and the available competencies (the level of competencies that each project manager possesses).  These required competencies should be compared with the available competencies.  The level of matching between required and available competencies indicates the level of compatibility between a project and a project manager, and has a vital role in project assignments

 It is essential that project managers who manage multiple, simultaneous projects possess another set of competencies to coordinate projects—multiple project management competencies.  They should be experts in interdependency management, multitasking, simultaneous team management, and interproject processes.  These competencies will help them utilize their own resource capacity to be able to take on more projects. 

At this point, we should have enough information regarding the importance of projects to the strategic direction of an organization and the compatibility level between projects and project managers.  Next, we need to know whether or not there are any limitations to project manager assignments.

 Organizational constraints

 Organizational constraints are criteria representing personal and organizational limitations/concerns regarding project manager assignments.  We found from our study that some organizations are most concerned about the credibility of a project manager.  Next is the strength of the project team, meaning if a project manager is assigned to a strong project team, he may be free from managing details.  Another important concern is the capacity of a project manager, which is often ignored by some organizations.  This includes the effective capacity, the current workload, and the availability measures (expressed in person-hours per time period).  Essentially, this constraint prevents a project manager from taking on more project assignments than his resource hours can support.  Another constraint is the project interdependencies and interactions.  The point here is that when several projects have strong interdependencies and interactions, they should be, if possible, assigned to the same project manager.  One last concern is the ability of the support staff, whose superior skills can enable a project manager to spend more time on value-added activities.   

In conclusion, to achieve effective project manager assignments, management should pay attention to the impact of the assignments on the organization.  By doing so, they should recognize that project assignments influence the success of projects.  This is a reason why we propose project requirements and competencies of project managers as assignment criteria.  In turn, the success of projects will enhance the success of the organization.   Organizational factors and constraints should be considered in project manager assignments as well.  We believe that an effective project manager assignment is one way to deploy organizational strategy down to the operational level of project management.  

With an understanding of the process of project manager assignments and the assignment criteria, we are currently developing a model for project assignments.  In the last stage, we will test our model with actual information from a company.  Page 1

  Please contact patanap@etm.pdx.edu for further details of this study.

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