A Revaluation Of The Criticality Of The Project Manager To The Project's Success

This paper aims to evaluate the relevance of the project manager to the project's success from the point of view of professionals connected to project management. The project management literature affirms, in a general manner, the importance of the project manager and many researchers presuppose his relevance to the project's success in such way that it can be considered common sense. However, over the last few decades, the project manager and his leadership were omitted in most of the quantitative researches on critical success factors, showing a direct contrast with theoretical and qualitative researches. A survey was applied with 740 project management professionals who evaluated the relevance of 35 critical success factors to a project's success (the factors were obtained through wide literature review). The data was analyzed using parametric procedures and the Pareto Principle was adopted in stratification to distinguish the most critical success factors. The data highlights the project manager as a Project Hypercritical Success Factor, highly relevant to a project's success. The data analyzed confirms the theoretical presumption of project manager relevance to success and reinforce the perception of researchers that project management is shifting to encompass a more human, social and cultural perspective. Project managers will need to demonstrate solid competency as managers and leaders. To achieve this result, their education and training will require a balance between soft and hard skills of project management and the project managers must be aware of their increasing recognition and the responsibility and weight that will follow.