The graduation project of the students Esra Abusharkh and Asila Al Shamli from the Industrial Engineering Department of the College of Engineering at Sultan Qaboos won second place in the graduation projects competition at the International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management held in Thailand from 5 to 7 March 2019. The project was done under the supervision of Drs. Nasr Al Hinai and Emad Summad, academics in the department.

The student Esra said: “the main objective of the project is to develop a framework to identify the basic skills and competencies required by the project managers working in the oil and gas industry. She stated that the motivation was to help the companies working in the oil and gas industry to identify the skills and competencies of project managers, which will positively impact on the success of each phase of the implementation of project. This is the reason why we focused in our study on the oil and gas companies operating in the Sultanate, as the impact of the environment and other factors may vary or require special consideration according to the country or region”.

The student Asila added: “at the beginning of this study we tried to understand the management of projects through our study in one of the courses taught in the department, which is about project management. Then, we focused on the use of scientific studies published in journals in different countries around the world. As a result, we developed a set of questionnaire based on scientific principles and distributed them to specialists working in the field of project management in local companies.”

The team members of the study said that the findings of their work would enable companies to determine the most appropriate framework for measuring their employees’ skills and competencies required to manage projects. Hence, the organizations can work on developing and strengthening these skills and competencies, which may help in increasing the chances of successful implementation of projects and increase the profitability of companies by reducing not planned costs.