PEOPLE SKILLS, ORGANISATIONAL SKILLS, OR TECHNICAL SKILLS? WHICH COMPETENCIES ARE MORE IMPORTANT FOR PROJECT SUCCESS?

Abstract

Researchers have found that soft skills are crucial in improving the project success rate. However, there is a long “shopping list” of skills proposed and no consensus on which soft skills are most critical. This research explores this issue in an international survey of 236 respondents, 78 of whom are project managers with 10+ years of experience. Multiple linear regression methods are used to explore the correlation between competency and project success and find that strategy and leadership alone explain 48.6% of the variance for project success. Technical skills and the other soft-skills were not found to be statistically important for project success. The surprising conclusion is that project success may not be dependent on the many factors listed in the literature but can be simply described by the equation below where S is Strategy, L is Leadership and € is the residual: Project success = 16 S + 20 L + €