Using Expert Systems for Coaching and Mentoring ICT Project Managers Robert T. Hans Department of Software Engineering Tshwane University of Technology Pretoria, South Africa hansr@tut.ac.za Ernest Mnkandla School of Computing University of South Africa Florida, South Africa mnkane@unisa.ac.za Abstract— Several risks, dynamics and challenges, including lack of skilled and experienced personnel, mobility associated with project management experts and tough economic conditions are just some of many issues that information and communications technology (ICT) organizations in the 21 st century have to deal with. Furthermore, these organizations are under constant pressure to improve project success rate which are unacceptably very low. Project managers who are ineffective in project leadership due to poor project skills pose a serious risk to project success. Some research studies indicate that the demand for ICT project managers with proper knowledge and expertise is ever increasing and the supply is nowhere near close in meeting the demand. As part of providing a solution to the abovementioned challenges and help equip ICT project managers with correct skills through mentoring and coaching, this research study is proposing the use of expert systems (ES). This proposal is a response to calls that have been made by other studies in project management that new approaches of developing project managers must be pursued. The use of expert systems to equip ICT project managers with the right skills and expertise will help advance and improve their software project management expertise. Just like ‘intelligent organizations’ that use expert systems to improve their decision-making processes in order to advance business efficiency and competitiveness so should expert systems be used to coach and mentor less experienced project managers. This research paper argues that the use of ES for coaching and mentoring yield many benefits for organizations. Keywords- expert system; intelligence system; project managers; coaching; mentoring; skills. I. INTRODUCTION Several risks, dynamics and challenges, such as, lack of skilled and experienced personnel, volatility of human experts [1] and tough economic conditions create a challenge for many information and communications technology (ICT) organizations in the 21 st century. These ICT organizations are under constant pressure to improve project success rate through, amongst other things, the use of experienced project managers who have great influence on project success [2] to run their projects. These are some of the challenges that organizations in the ICT sector have to contend with in their quest to deliver value to both stakeholders and shareholders. According to Schwalbe [3] the project management framework consists of nine knowledge areas, which describe the key competencies that project managers should possess in all the nine knowledge areas in order to deliver on projects’ mandates. However, a study by Hans et al. [4] shows that ICT project managers in South Africa lack some key project management competencies, and these include problem-solving and leadership expertise. Project managers who are ineffective in project leadership due to poor project skills pose a serious risk to project success [5][6]. Project managers may lack appropriate expertise due to a number of reasons. They may lack skills because of not being properly trained or mentored and were just appointed based on their previous excellent performance in their former positions. The above-mentioned challenges make it necessary for ICT organizations to rethink their business practices of training and mentoring their project managers. Moreover, talent development for project and program managers remains a top concern in organizations. This comes as no surprise given that research studies indicate that experience and project management expertise are key in delivering successful projects [3][7][8]. Metaxiotis [9] indicates that the demand for ICT project managers with proper knowledge and expertise is ever increasing and its supply is nowhere near close in meeting the demand. As part of providing a solution in equipping ICT project managers with appropriate skills through mentoring and coaching, this research study is proposing the use of expert systems. The proposed solution will result in project managers improving their software project management expertise. The use of the proposed ES would further address the skewed supply-demand ratio of knowledge-based resources – the supply of skilled project managers will be improved. It will also enable the training of project managers in the real-world project environment as requested by Ramazani et al. [10]. The use of the proposed ES will also relieve project management experts from the duties of mentoring and coaching which they sometimes do reluctantly [11]. Ramazani et al. [10] are calling for fresh approaches in the development of project managers, and this paper’s proposal intends to fill that gap by proposing a new approach in training, coaching, mentoring and development of project managers through the use of expert systems. Even though expert systems have been used in other areas of the project management discipline, to the best knowledge of the authors of this paper expert systems have not been used for the development of project managers. Therefore, this research paper proposes a novel approach to use expert systems to provide the above mentioned services and thus address the challenges which are plaguing the project management discipline. The remainder of this research paper proceeds as follows. Section II presents a research methodology used in this 447 Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-61208-367-4 ICSEA 2014 : The Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering Advances