How Does the Nomination of a Project Manager Affect Project Success?

Abstract

There have been only few empirical studies that have attempted to explore the relationship between the nomination of a project manager (PM) and project success. Thus, as the researcher’s attempt to fill this knowledge gap, this research was designed to examine the effect of project manager nomination on project success. Because the primary role of the project manager (PM) is to work with senior management to ensure that they provide resources and support and take care of team issues that might negatively influence the team’s productivity, the starring role of a PM is indispensable. Most of all, given limited project resources, the PM is responsible for making trade-off decisions between project budget, project schedule, and project scope that are needed to ensure project success. Hence, the project manager (PM) is the glue holding the project together and the mover and shaker spurring it on. In brief, the project manager is an important contributor to project success. However, surprisingly enough, most company executives do not even acknowledge the significant role a project manager plays to project success; and hence the assignment of a PM to a project is not their concern as such. This, as a result, leads to frequent project failures even without knowing the genuine cause of the failure. As any rational thinker can imagine, if the true problem (cause of the failure) is not known, a curing solution is unlikely to be applied. Yet many efforts have been spent in recent decades to enhance the project management success. But results are still highly unsatisfactory, perhaps because the true problem is not yet identified - nomination of the wrong PM. Briefly, disregarding the effect of project manager nomination on project success and expecting successful project conclusion is like doing the same mistake again and again and expecting a different result. Accordingly, since the success or failure of a project predominantly depends on who manages it, nominating a project manager to a project is among the most important decisions in project management. With the right nomination, a project manager is more likely to coordinate the human and material resources of the project to its success than otherwise. However, the nomination process should neither be a procedural undertaking nor too late to lead the project on the right track. Likewise, one of the major findings of this research supports the idea that the nomination of the right project manager to the right project at the right time is a strategic decision that affects key project parameters. Nevertheless, regardless of the potential effect of the nomination decision on the success of a project, nominating the right project manager to a project is often very challenging. To sum up, the nomination of a project manager to a project is the most phenomenal decision to be made by the senior management of an organization as early as possible. The early nomination enables the project manager to get involved in the project development endeavours beginning from its inception, and helps him/her to fully comprehend the project objective and any other commitment that might have been assumed in the planning stage of the project or even before. Finally, this research also uncovered that the more the organizational context, the strategic importance of the project, the competency of the project manager, the specific requirements of the project, and the availability of the project manager (when the PM to be assigned is to manage multiple projects simultaneously) are considered during project manager nomination, the superior the nomination will be.

Keywords: Nomination, Perception, Project Manager, Project Success

DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/12-22-01

Publication date:August 31st 2020