It has been a while since by last blog. Seems to be a busy summer.

I am still reading the Project Management Journal with interest. The new editor, Hans Georg Gemunde, put out his fist issue in June. His letter from the editor was great. Dr. Gemunde discussed trends in project management and the need for quality research. Hard to argue his points.

As I have pointed out in past blogs, if the PMJ is a representation of the PM Research, and I believe it probably is, then we have a ways to go before we will have research that has practical application for the project manager.

 

I reviewed research proposals for PMI this summer and found some good research concepts; which I take as a good sign. Most of the proposal suggested that the authors did not have any PM experience and the research they proposed would be of little value.

 

There were six papers in the June edition of the PMJ. The article, MBTI Personality Types of Project Managers and Their Success by Cohen, Orney and Keren, all professors at Israeli Universities, is the only one that interested me. The research conducted a survey of 280 project managers identified by master’s degree students from their universities, representing several different industries. The survey included four parts. The first focused on project success; did the project manager believe the project was a success based on the PM’s satisfaction, the client’s, the manager’s and overall satisfaction.  The second and third focused on the PM’s personality type and the third focused on demographic data (years as PM, gender, age etc.) Completing the questionnaire took 20 – 30 minutes.

 

The authors concluded that Project Managers have unique personality type. Essentially, project managers were more likely to be NTs (43%) on the Myers Birggs Type Indicator (MBIT). This indicates an ability to tolerate risk, make decisions with less data and deals with uncertainty and ambiguity. These conclusions are consistent with my own observations and no surprise.

Interestingly, the survey showed that NT project managers had the lowest self- reported success rate. The SF, the MBTI with the least project managers (6.9%) showed the highest self-reported success.

The authors suggest four reasons why SFs might be more successful as project managers.

1.      SF project managers have special talents needed to be project managers

2.      They manage unique projects

3.      Success is inflated

4.      Data is insufficient

The authors conclude by suggesting that the relationship between personality types of project success need more research.

Understanding the relationship between personality type of the project manager and project success is a reasonable research question for the project management profession. Unfortunately, this research does not help us answer this question.

1.      Using the MBTI is a good tool for developing a personality type for project managers.

2.      Defining success by asking project managers to report their belief on their own success does not seem very reliable.

3.      Many times I have seen project managers be very successful on one project and fail on another project. This indicates that each project type may need a unique set of skills, knowledge and personality type.

Until we have a tool, method or process for profiling projects, all research on generic project success based on an independent variable will have serious flaws. I strongly believe that our number one research priority in project management should be the development of a method for profiling projects.

Russ