Characteristics of high performing IT personnel

Abstract

placed significant emphasis on characteristics related to working with others, while the accountants viewed top IT personnel as loners.With the increasing decentralization of IT responsibilities and personnel to functional areas, the management of IT project teams changes, with more responsibilities for end-user managers in systems development and technology integration tasks. Results of a pilot study to identify differences in the perceptions of IT professionals versus the end-users with respect to the characteristics of top performing IT personnel are presented here.This study is intended to extend previous research, which considered only skills and knowledge areas to include personality characteristics. Thus, this research has significance for IS training, IS staffing, and human resource management, and may also serve as impetus for future projects to determine superior versus inferior methods for the management of IT projects.A three-round Delphi study was conducted, using MBA students from the IS and accounting disciplines. Both groups agreed that outstanding IT people are characterized by their creative problemsolving skills and their ability to abstract business problems. The IT ranked business functional knowledge, interpersonal skills, and a team-orientation very highly.The accountants, however, placed more emphasis on technical skills. The IT personnel Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for prolit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. 'fo copy otherwise. to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.

Important characteristics of software development team members: an empirical investigation using Repertory Grid

“…Some of the identified categories of the characteristics of good IS development team members in our study can be found in the list of traits developed by Walz & Wynekoop (1997). However, the relative importance of the identified categories that are perceived by our research participants is different from the findings in Wynekoop & Walz (1999). Our research participants viewed attitude/motivation, expertise, working/cognitive ability, and interpersonal/communication skills as the most important characteristics, while the IT professionals in their study rated abstract thinking, creativity, interpersonal skills, technical and business knowledge as having the highest importance.…”

“…Another reason for the difference may be the research participants' experience. The average number of years of working experience in our sample is over 9 years, vs. 4.5 years in the study conducted by Wynekoop & Walz (1999).…”

“…Our research participants viewed attitude/motivation, expertise, working/cognitive ability, and interpersonal/communication skills as the most important characteristics, while the IT professionals in their study rated abstract thinking, creativity, interpersonal skills, technical and business knowledge as having the highest importance. One reason for this difference may be that the context of their study (Wynekoop & Walz, 1999) is not as specific as ours, i.e. the specific environment where the IS professions work – whether they work independently or within a team.…”

“…Using MBA students as research participants, Wynekoop & Walz (1999) conducted a Delphi study to generate a list of 19 characteristics of exceptional software developers. The studies of Wynekoop and colleagues (Walz & Wynekoop, 1997; Wynekoop & Walz, 1999; 2000) extended previous research, which primarily considered skills and knowledge requirements of IS professionals, to take into account personality characteristics. However, no study, to our best knowledge, has directly investigated the important characteristics of software developers in the team context.…”

“…Hunter (1994) interviewed 70 research participants, including various stakeholders of system development projects, and identified several important themes about the characteristics of excellent systems analysts – communication, attitude, knowledge, investigation and experience. Using MBA students as research participants, Wynekoop & Walz (1999) conducted a Delphi study to generate a list of 19 characteristics of exceptional software developers. The studies of Wynekoop and colleagues (Walz & Wynekoop, 1997; Wynekoop & Walz, 1999; 2000) extended previous research, which primarily considered skills and knowledge requirements of IS professionals, to take into account personality characteristics.…”