Description
ABSTRACT
The current study suggests a different and innovative view by testing a unique combination of variables, which are unproven in a single model for the purpose of increasing the ratio of sustainable projects. The project manager can use the model to look into their projects and can compose necessary changes for better outcomes. The study postulates the competence breach of project managers with regard to sustainability, and to deliver direction on how to fulfill the research gap.
The objective of this study was to identify and test the influence of soft skills of project managers on success of a project. The study design was cross-sectional and quantitative approach based; to achieve this aim, deductive approach was adopted. The sample size of the study was 100 respondents, and data were collected from Coca-Cola bottling company. The collected data were then analyzed by doing the structural equation modeling in PLS-SEM in order to examine the relationships. The outcomes demonstrate positive impact of project manager soft competences on project sustainability and mediating impact of innovation among the relationship of project manager soft competences and project sustainability. Innovation is directly linked to project sustainable development, and was accepted, which aligns with the previous studies. This research reflects the role of project manager soft competences on innovation and project sustainability. The study is unique in its scope and implications as the focus is upon empirical investigation of the project manager soft competences and project sustainability in the Nigerian context.
Our results implies that organizations need to give attention to the soft skills of a project manager
Keywords: Soft Skills, Project Success, Project Manager, Nigerian
TABLE OF CONTENT
1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF STUDY.. 14
2.6 TEAM-BUILDING AND DELEGATION SKILLS. 27
2.7 PROBLEM-FINDING, ANALYZING & SOLVING SKILLS. 27
3.5 THEORETICAL FORMULATION.. 33
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
“Projects are renowned for making up a crucial part of companies and society’s sustainable growth”. The sustainability theory has connected with the triple bottom line related to the basic economic, social, and foundation triple base line that needed a new project perspective.
The viability of the project faces the growth cycle (method to understand the productivity of the project) in developing countries, which is probably the most important obstacle. Businesses around the globe have implemented sustainability policies, and thus the concept of sustainability has become a valid component of decision making, and has gained increased attention in management literature and media. The uniqueness of each project plays a challenging role as project manager and requires a variety of skills from it. Numerous studies are being conducted to determine the most needed skill for a project manager. The labor market is evolving, and new gaps are emerging. Thus, it is inferred that the “project manager has a key role in the project and this role provides the ability to control many aspects of the project”. When projects are recognized as having a crucial role to play in organizations and society’s sustainable development, the academic debate arose on the relationship between project management and sustainability. “Project managers and programmers are well placed to contribute to sustainable management activities”. Moreover, Debby and Goedknegt(2016); Gilbert and Silvius(2019); and Marc de Graaf(2012) also recognizes this crucial position of project managers, who argues that the project manager has “a lot” of impact on the implementation of sustainability concepts in the project. The actual sustainability obligation (proper implementation of project sequence model) can vary from project to project, but the project manager should still have a definitive or powerful role (Silvius et al. 2019). The skills are not new to the project management industry. There is a great need to develop a comprehensive project management framework, which includes the main sustainability competencies. Project manager’s competencies are expected to be static and not dynamic. Acceptance of diverse project management skills has significant consequences for both (professional and academic) fields.
Cohesive project teams should create a leadership and authority structure to integrate functional elements, skills and discipline into a cohesive whole, to achieve the goals of the project. The project team’s key role is ‘not to do the job but to organize the decision process’; the project manager’s role in recognizing sustainability includes technical competencies.
Innovation describes both a mechanism and an outcome. Project management has a special connection to handling innovation, so that most creative tasks are performed by project. Innovation project processes also involve a gated mechanism designed to promote creative projects, with increased rates of monitoring as funding rises over the lifecycle of the project. The project develops a specific approach, from conception through to execution and eventual value realization. Innovation is critical for the economic health of the developed world; innovation can be credited to as much as half of all GDP (Gross Domestic Product) growth. A manager who wants to guide and direct the important processes of innovation needs to be or become an innovation manager with notable leadership skills. Sustainable performance improvement, which can be gregarious to the community, also means the company has to innovate.
Organizational change has become an essential part of any organization and cannot be avoided. Change is the transformation from one state to another; (Moran, 2012). It introduces improvement or development to the organization different from its current situation to achieve its goals professionally.
There are many drivers for change, including the continuous advancement of technology, internal processes, acknowledgment of risk, consumer preferences changes, rival force, acquiring and alliances, and company restructuring (Coca-Cola, 2019).
Coca-Cola is an American enterprise for soft beverages and water. It was founded in 1886 in Atlanta, New York, after being designed by pharmacist John Stith in his laboratory by combining Coca-Cola syrup with sparkling water. Coca-Cola acquired the title of the most valuable brand (Shaw, 2018). Coca-Cola Corporation is considered one of the earliest enterprises in the world. It has operated within various local and outside changes since it has been created. The firm has used methods of change management to sustain itself in the market. Coca-
Cola has been the governing soft-drink firm during the 20th era for its unbelievable flavour and fashionableness. Coca-Cola has a novel method, which is business confidence. Coca-Cola is so essential throughout 200 nations. Reference to the Greatest Brand 2015 news, Coca-Cola is classified as the third most worthy brand after tech behemoths like Google and Apple (Coca-Cola, 2019).
When the company’s shares went public, the brand was already in the process of pushing Coca-Cola towards its current market leadership position. The famous company regularly bought many competitors one by one, and its shares kept rising 11% annually, making it one of the best investment opportunities. Thanks to its global network of franchised bottling plants that use concentrated syrup, The Coca-Cola Company can sell its popular products in nearly every country in the world (Vizard, 2020).
According to Yang Huang and Wu (2010) projects manager plays important role in success of any project. Key pillars of any project management program include profession, planning, and execution. Siguroarson (2009) stated that in past project management education mostly focused on hard or technical skills of project manager; but now there is more focus on the inclusion of soft skills in the project manager’s education. Generally, the hard skills related to the project management include planning, evaluation, monitoring, scheduling, and risk management. on the other hand, now the soft skills are gaining popularity and include ability to work with different type of people, personality traits, handling stress, leadership, conflict management, and communication (Robles (2012); Shi & Chen (2016). A key characteristic of soft skills is that these skills are intangible and difficult to measure. They are more associated with organizational behavior aspect and dealing with people associated with a particular project.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The rising trend of project management indicates that modern project managers need to acquire a large amount of solid soft skills. This research demonstrates the meaning of ‘professional competencies’ as a high level educated or special trained ability and one of the umbrella term’s branch, so called soft skills as abilities to collaborate co-worker. This research collects the published data as well as literature from academic journals and specialist books.
In the early 1970’s, an evaluation result of competency was used as a replacement for IQ as well as an evidence of one’s working capacity. Lack of competency is one of the problems hindering productivity in most organizations till date. Competency was defined as an underlying characteristic of a person including motives, traits, knowledge, skill, aspects of one’s self-image or social role, or a body of knowledge which he or she uses. Karen, P Project management skills (2017) Competency is knowledge, skill, ability or characteristics associated with high performance on a job, such as problem solving, analytical thinking or leadership. Maidenhead: Open University Publishing; (2005). Soft skills can be related to how much contributions a staff makes. Consequently, company executives prefer to encourage their candidates having more strong soft skills. Robles(2012) The modern day market is showing that hard skills are not enough to help people to keep their jobs, especially right-sizing and cutting positions time in a company. This research disclosed that three quarters of long range work success rely on soft skills, while only one quarter is attributed to hard skills. (Watts & Watts (2008). Generally because of inherent limitations to gauge the effects of soft skills, they are often under noticed, or may not be granted due importance as it should be (Mayo (2013). It is probably due to this reason that studies measures that the direct impact of the project manager’s soft skills on project success are scarce Mittal, (2011) and even where little attention has been paid towards this aspect, the focus on researchers have been on investigating the behavior of the leaders and exploring the impact of project manager’s leadership style instead of project managers soft skill on project success. Yang Huang & Wu (2010). Past leadership studies have noted that communication by leaders to team members results in high group effectiveness. Mathieu (2010). Ineffective communication between project managers and team members will alleviate intermediary problems that negatively affect the project success; Turaga ,(2013)
Government and Private sectors promote the use of soft skills by recruiting fresh graduates who have developed interpersonal skills and would help to increase the rate of success in organizations. This has also helped people to work and perform well in a suitable environment. Soft skills are not only important in organizations for facing clients, it is also very important for an employee to interact with his client, That’s why employees give a lot of importance to soft skills so that they can create a productive and healthy environment. The introduction of soft skills into organizations has helped in reducing the problem of lack of productivity in projects and has increased project success rates in various organizations.
The key problem this study is investigating is the low level of awareness and application of soft skills requirement of project managers for the success of a project. Most bottling industry hires technicians as a project manager who may have sound technical knowledge but lack soft skills. Lack of such soft skills can decrease project manager’s ability to handle projects efficiently and effectively. Lack of soft skills of project managers can also result in failure of a project. Thus, this study investigate that what role soft skills plays in the performance of project managers and how these soft skills influence success of a project.
Soft skills is being characterized as intangible and utterly expressive, they are not measured but felt. Unlike managing organizational structure, it deals with managing organizational behavior and outlook of key persons associated with a task. Soft skills, therefore define a manger’s skills in fostering inter and intra organizational relationships amongst all types of people associated with project (Kirsch, 2015).
It is in this domain, that manager gets the best out of his team, which delicately lies between manager and success of project. No project can be executed to perfection, if manager fails to unite the efforts of his team towards the final outcome. Being at the execution and implementing end, managers are dependent on their teams for successful implementation of their orders, directives and instructions. Hence, there has to be an association amongst project manager’s leadership, project team member’s team work and project outcome; however, very little research has been done on identification of this impact and resultant benefits (Yang Huang & Wu, 2010).
Sustainability projects are the most important issue facing the development process in developing countries. Project managers who lack competence are a “common cause of project failure”. There is a great need to “develop a framework for project management that incorporates key sustainability skills”
Improving soft skills attributes for project managers might appear as a necessity to improve methodologies of project management in order to increase the success of projects, but this is beyond the scope of this study. In addition, it is not within the goals of this study to encompass all possible soft skills factors that might have an effect on project success.
There are diametrically opposing trends in both the public and private sector influencing professional development decision making for both organizational leadership and the manufacturing professional seeking to improve their skills and knowledge. The first trend is the downturn in the economy faced by individuals and organizations alike. The combination of the difficulty in quantifying investments in professional development (Gale & Brown (2014); Guskey Hordle (2016) and the shrinking global economy has put downward pressure on professional development budgets (Anderson (2009); Foster (2009); Newgass, (2010). Simultaneously, the second trend is an increase in demand for practitioners with advanced certifications that demonstrate proficiency within a certain body of knowledge (Daniels, (2011); Gabberty(2013). In addition to published research, the 2011 project management salary survey of over 30,000 respondents from 29 countries supported the value placed on certification through an average 16% compensation variance in favor of certified professionals when compared to non-certified practitioners (PMI, 2011). This growing demand for certified professionals is further evidenced by the increasing demand for certification preparation programs in higher education (Alam Gale (2017); Brown, & Khan (2010); & Daniels 2011)
Professional certifications, such as the Project Management Professional (PMP) through the Project Management Institute and the Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) through the International Institute for Business Analysis, require continuing education to maintain the certification. Continuing education requirements are designed to encourage certified practitioners to remain current in their respective bodies of knowledge. However, continued study in a body of knowledge in which the practitioner has already demonstrated proficiency through earning the certification may be neither the best approach for their continued professional development, nor the optimum approach for enhancing their ability to contribute to their organization. Instead of centering professional development decisions on a generic body of knowledge for a given profession, this study provides information related to other contributing factors and dimensions of performance and capability that we should consider in sum to tailor professional development goals.
If we asked experienced project managers, how many of them would suggest that their depth of knowledge of the PMBOK processes or tools and techniques was the key to their success? Likewise, if we went to senior leaders and project sponsors, how many would suggest they needed project managers with a deeper understanding of the project management body of knowledge? This study contributes to both stakeholder groups’ understanding of the attributes most important for a certified practitioner’s proficiency to avoid hiring for the wrong skills or investing time, effort, and money on professional development that does not yield the desired results.
1.3 AIM AND OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The aim of this study is to investigate the role of project management soft skills in increasing project success in COCA-COLA bottling company, Nigeria and
The specific objectives is to:
- Identify the roles of professional project managers in project success.
- Identify project manager soft skills used by COCA-COLA company to achieve business growth.
- Examine the factors affecting project manager’s soft skills in the study area.
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
- What are the roles of professional project managers in different project success within Nigeria?
- What are the project management soft skills used by COCA-COLA bottling company?
- What are the factors affecting project manager’s soft skills in the study area.
1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
The result obtained from this research will provide in depth information about the soft leadership skills and how these impact project success; moreover, it will also be able to ascertain in Nigerian environments, the moderating role of team work in the relationship between project manager’s soft leadership skills and project success. This in turn will assist the project managers not only in exercising appropriate skills needed for successfully influencing the project outcome, but will also help them in understanding the team works’ influence in impacting relationship between soft leadership skills and project success.
The study is beneficial for the project managers as they can use the findings to identify and improve their skills deficiency. The findings is also beneficial for different industries as these firms can devise better recruitment and selection, and training and development function based on the findings of the study. The HR managers of these industries can also use the findings of the present study.
1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The scope of this study is limited to its aim and objectives. It has no intention to show, nor does it suggest how to acquire soft and/or interpersonal skills. This study examines soft skills and project success on a theoretical basis. The hard skills section shown in Figure 7 (Soft Skills and Hard Skills saturation points success model) is presumed, for the sake of this study, to be satisfactory; for example, there exists a best mixture of hard skills that can be formed in order to achieve the best effect on projects.
The soft skills factors used in this study can be considered as a subset of soft skills in general. The selection of these factors comes from the researcher’s belief that they are sufficient to bring the evidence for the aims and objectives in this study. Moreover, interpersonal skills which are basically related to the person are not investigated. Some examples of such interpersonal skills are creative thinking, integrity, and sense of humor.
It is not meant to be a comprehensive literature review of soft skills and project success factors. But instead, it is meant to illustrate the existence of a different point of view for each factor. Accordingly, some points of view might be intentionally/unintentionally rolled out.
1.7 DEFINITION OF TERMS
- Production: In simple terms, ‘Production’ is the process of manufacturing or fabricating or producing certain type of goods, semi finished or finished, input being basic raw material or semi finished products or sub assemblies. Production is a measure of output only and not a measure of efficiency of the organization.
- Productivity: Biggest and most challenging task faced today by any organization is “PRODUCTIVITY”. It is the measure of the combined efficiency or integrated efficiency of employees, machines and other devices and equipments, nature of raw material inputs, performance of the management, efficiency of the whole production system. Productivity can be computed and expressed as the ratio of average acceptable output per period by the total costs incurred through various resources ( Labor, Input material, consumables, power utilized, capital, energy, material, personnel) consumed in that period. It is nothing but a measure of efficiency of the integrated system consisting of resources like Money, Men, Materials, Machines (4 Ms of an industry) and time etc.
- Organisational Performance: this comprises the actual output or results of an organization as measured against its intended goals and objectives.
- Soft Skill: those qualities necessary for a practitioner that do not depend on acquired knowledge, or hard skills
- Profitability: Profitability of any system or organization hint at how efficient the organization utilizes its resources and assets to produce the outputs. Productivity of different elements in the system ultimately decides the profitability of any organization. Output and profitability of different organizations in the Nation decides the progress of the Nation which is very significant for its global status. For progress of the Nation what is most required is the highest productivity of different organizations engaged in production or service industry. But the astonishing factor is that there is not a single organization which does not face the problem regarding productivity since the factors affecting productivity are of confronting nature and large in number. Low productivity leads to reduced profitability of the organization, cumulative effect of which is the retarded growth of the Nation.
- Partial Productivity: When only one variety of inputs is considered for the measurement of productivity, then it is often referred as “Partial Productivity”. For example, measurement in no of pieces of shirts produced from a fixed length of a cloth piece. In an organization, worker hours, materials or power used per unit of production are typical examples of partial productivity.
- Risk Management: Risk management refers to the culture, processes, and structures in place to ensure that risks, such as possible opportunities and threats to project objectives, are effectively managed.
- Construction Sector: This is made up of consultants for design, clients as owners or commissioners, and contractors for construction and installation management, as well as material suppliers.
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