What are the problems and their solutions in IT Project manager selection?
Authors: A. Afshari; J. Kowal
Year: 2018

Information Technology (IT) project success is a research topic that has received the attention of academics and practitioners, at least, in the lasted two decades. The selection of an IT project manager with the right skills and competencies is critical to the IT project success. Selecting the best IT project manager among many alternatives is a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of the applying MCDM techniques in IT project manager selection problem. Also, it provides an overview on various criteria used. While there are a few chapters or sections in different books related to this topic (Afshari and Kowal, 2017), we have not seen any comprehensive review papers or book chapter that can cover it. We end our review paper with recommendations for future research. This paper provides useful insights into the MCDM method and suggests a framework for future attempts in this area for academic researchers and practitioners Based on the literature review on categorized issues for the study, research gaps were identified and analyzed by the researchers. Summary of the findings and research gaps are discussed in following sub sections: 1. There is still much to uncover about project management competency. Further exploratory work of this nature, both in the IT field and others, will lead to a far better understanding of what makes a competent project manager. 2. IT project managers must continuously develop their skills and competences throughout their career. To date, there have been only a handful of studies that have examined IT PM skills. This confirms findings by Roztocki and Weistroffer (2014) that few information systems studies conducted in or on IT use of recognized theories. Moreover, there has been no systematic attempt to discern the relative importance of these skills. Thus, there is still a need for more exploratory work not only to identify the important IT PM skills but also to determine their relative importance in a rigorous manner. 3. While the studies described above contribute to our understanding of the skills that may be important for IT PMs to possess, there are two important gaps in the literature that we seek to address. First, there has been only a very limited effort to determine the relative importance of various IT PM Skills (Jiang, Klein, and Margulis, 1998) and the work that has been done suffers from serious methodological limitations. Second, there have been few attempts to understand why particular skills are viewed as being of paramount importance and how their perceived importance may be affected by particular contextual factors (e.g., project size, project complexity, project risk, and project type). Furthermore, there has been no attempt to understand how the skills that are considered to be the most important for IT PMs can be acquired or developed. 4. In further works may be researcher provides another effective mechanism in modeling the decision maker’s preference and to effectively handle the imprecision of the human decision making process in IT PM selection problem.