Using Predictive Analysis for Improved Project Manager Assignment

It is commonly agreed that project management competence is a critical success factor for project based organizations. However, there is not sufficient research in literature to develop objective analytical methods to identify required project management skill level for a project. In practice, practitioners still need an effective methodology to determine competence level needed to manage a particular project —especially in larger companies where it is difficult for management to subjectively identify right project manager for new and ongoing projects. Even for the projects with assigned project manager, there is value in understanding if the assigned project manager has the right skill level for the project. In this paper, authors address problem of analytically identifying right project management skill level. Specifically, this paper demonstrates how supervised learning can be used to build models for predicting required project management skill level, thus enabling focused and individualized resource management. Further, these techniques are illustrated in the context of real-world project data from a large IT firm.