Evaluation of construction professionals' skills to compete as project manager

Abstract

A competent Project Manager is the corner stone in any successful project. In Sri Lanka, most of the construction projects have not been completed satisfactorily within the project management parameters such as time, cost and quality due to the unavailability of professional Project Managers which have been replaced by non professional persons to work as Project Managers. The purpose of this study is to identify the important skills of Professionally Qualified Project Managers and lacking skills of the Construction Professional to work as competent Project Manager .Therefore it was referred to some researches that have been carried out internationally to identify the most important skills that are essential for the Project Managers. Thereafter, twenty important Project Managers' skills were identified based on these researches and Data was collected under two phases. In the Phase one, the Questionnaires Survey, identified twenty skills were reconfirmed by the leading 30 Project Managers in Sri Lanka and in phase two ,90 questionnaires were circulated among the Project Officers of the National Savings Bank and they were requested to rank the skills that the Construction Professionals performed at their sites based on the completed thirty building Projects to find lacking skills of the Construction Professionals compared to Competent Project Managers' Skills. Results indicated that Sri Lankan Project Managers considered that Time management, Decision making, Leadership and Motivation Problem Solving and Communication are among the top five skills of the competent Project Managers. According to the results, the most lacking five skills of the Civil Engineers were identified as Result orientation, Negotiation, Ability to follow up, Administration and Delegating. Results indicated that the most lacking five skills of the Quantity Surveyors are Problem Solving, Critical Path Thinking, Technical knowledge, Result orientation and Creativity. According to the opinion of Project Officers, it has shown that the several skills of the Project Managers are compatible with Architect's skills. However, Critical path Thinking, Financial Management, Technical Knowledge, Time Management and Planning and Goal Setting are the most lacking five skills of the Architects compared to Project Manager's Skills. KEYWORDS: Skills, Project Management, Project Managers, Civil Engineers, Quantity Surveyors, and Architects.