Training Soft Skills to Project Managers An Experience Report

The success of software projects is driven by the magical triangle between time, budget, and quality. While short term thinking focuses on time and budget, it is quality that has the most important impact on long term customer satisfaction. Thus, providing good quality software is crucial for success. Quality is influenced by several factors. It depends on the entire software development process and related activities (e.g., requirements management, configuration management, design controls, etc.). However, quality cannot be forced from outside. It is well known, but often forgotten, that it is the team and its relation to the project manager that decides on success or failure of a project. Improving the skills of the project managers improves the quality of the products. The limiting factor usually is not related to technical skills that can be trained quite easily. In fact, project management is all about communication and leadership competencies which are far more difficult (but not impossible) to train. In this paper, the author reports on experiences with this kind of training from an industrial point of view. In particular, the author describes what was most helpful and where the major difficulties lay.