An Empirical investigation on project manager skills sets in telecommunications new product development projects

The Telecommunications industry (called 'Telco' for short) is a technology agile service providing business. It has gone through remarkable changes in the last decade with de-regulations, globalisation of markets, and therefore increasing competitive pressures. Telco companies are forced to convert technological advances into new products in much shorter time. Few studies are dedicated to New Product Development (NPD) in this recently hypercompetitive industry with its status today. Our study addresses this gap; it examines Telco NPD project characteristics and the associated skills sets, which are groupings of closely related skills, for project managers to be successful. This paper presents the results of testing a literature grounded skill set framework with a small population, as the first stage in a progressing empirical investigation. Additionally, the impacts of the project phases in stage-gated NPD process are examined. The findings are compared with the selected project manager standards, and the differences are highlighted.