Development and Evaluation of an Instrument for Identification of Competence Needs in Project Management

• Main Author: Mallcott Reinales, Alexandra
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet, Institutt for industriell økonomi og teknologiledelse 2014
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:no:ntnu:diva-26108

Increasingly more organizations manage and execute projects, and the performance and deliverables of the project will be dependent on the competence of the project manager and team members and their ability to apply their knowledge and experience. In this sense, employers must identify the competences required to execute the tasks successfully, and any gap between the available and the required competence level should be addressed.Grounded on this idea, the general objective of this master thesis was to develop and evaluate an instrument to identify competence needs in project management for the Project Control and Analysis (PCA) department in Statoil. For this purpose, a literature review was conducted in order to establish a theoretical framework of previous published work in the fields of competence development, project management competence standards, and design and evaluation of tools for competence assessment.Then, the initial competence assessment tool was designed based on the internal processes and on the descriptions of positions from the department, taking into consideration the findings from the literature review, which indicate that attention should be put to the wording, sequencing and categorization of items, and that a competence scale needs to be created with well-described levels.For evaluating the reliability and validity of the instrument designed, 22 semi-structured interviews were executed spanning all the position types and portfolios in the department, eliciting the opinions from employees with more than 5 years of experience within the PCA functions. Consequently, the results from the interviews were analyzed according to the convergence among participants and with the theoretical framework, and the final competence assessment tool was created. Furthermore, it was suggested to include the competence assessment as part of the People@Statoil process, which is a corporate process for people development, deployment, performance and reward.Finally, it was identified that the development programs in an organization should include both formal and informal learning activities. Therefore, improvements to the current competence development methods in the PCA department were suggested, proposing a combination of courses, on-the-job training, mentoring and coaching, use of collaborative IT tools and networking.The competence assessment tool created in this thesis is considered very important and useful for the PCA department, since it will help to determine the competence strengths and weaknesses from the individuals and implement improvement plans that will enhance overall performance. In addition, the methodology used and the recommendations presented can be followed by other organizations that intend to implement a competence assessment process.Keywords: competence assessment tool, competence development, project management, project control and analysis