Role Models: Mining Role Transitions Data in IT Project Management

The notion of roles is crucial in project management across various domains. A role indicates a broad set of tasks, activities, deliverables and responsibilities that the person needs to carry out within a project. Assigning roles to team members clarifies the expectations of work items to be delivered by each and structures the interactions of the team among themselves as well as with external stakeholders. This paper analyzes a sizeable real-life dataset regarding the actual usage of roles in software development and maintenance projects in a large multinational IT organization. The paper introduces and formalizes concepts such as seniority level of a role, career progression and career lines, formulates various business questions related to role-based project management, proposes analytics techniques to answer them and outlines the actual results produced to answer the business questions. The business questions are related to dependencies between roles, patterns in role assignments and durations, predicting role changes, discovering insights useful for meeting career aspirations, interesting role sequences etc. The proposed analytics algorithms are based on Markov models, sequence mining, classification and survival analysis.