Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to identify the soft skills of construction project management; and second, to investigate the influence of these soft skills on project success factors in the Vietnamese construction industry. Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire survey was conducted with 108 project management professionals from the Vietnamese construction industry. Partial least square structural equation modelling was employed in data analysis. Findings: Four-dimensional structure of project success factors was confirmed in this study. Results also showed that soft skills of project managers significantly contributed to project success factors and hence the project success. Research limitations/implications: There may be geographical limitation on the conclusions drawn from the findings. Similarly, the sample size was still small, despite a relatively high response rate. In addition, the majority of the respondents were contractors and clients as other project players were reluctant to respond to the survey. Practical implications: This study provides an understanding of the relationship between soft skills and project success factors. Originality/value: Although there have been studies focused on soft skills of project management and project success factors, few have attempted to analyse the effects of these soft skills on critical success factors. Thus, this study adds significantly to the existing research on both project management skills and project success factors.

Purpose: One of the major challenges for any project is to prepare and develop an achievable baseline schedule and thus set the project up for success, rather than failure. The purpose of this paper is to explore and investigate research outputs in one of the major causes, optimism bias, to identify problems with developing baseline schedules and analyse mitigation techniques and their effectiveness recommended by research to minimise the impact of this bias.Design/methodology/approach: A systematic quantitative literature review was followed, examiningProject Management Journals, documenting the mitigation approaches recommended and then reviewing whether these approaches were validated by research.Findings: Optimism bias proved to be widely accepted as a major cause of unrealistic scheduling for projects, and there is a common understanding as to what it is and the effects that it has on original baseline schedules. Based upon this review, the most recommended mitigation method is Flyvbjerg’s “Reference class,” which has been developed based upon Kahneman’s “Outside View”. Both of these mitigation techniques are based upon using an independent third party to review the estimate. However, within the papers reviewed, apart from the engineering projects, there has been no experimental and statistically validated research into the effectiveness of this method. The majority of authors who have published on this topic are based in Europe.Research limitations/implications: The short-listed papers for this review referred mainly to non-engineering projects which included information technology focussed ones. Thus, on one hand, empirical research is needed for engineering projects, while on the other hand, the lack of tangible evidence for the effectiveness of methods related to the alleviation of optimism bias issues calls for greater research into the effectiveness of mitigation techniques for not only engineering projects, but for all projects.Originality/value: This paper documents the growth within the project management research literature over time on the topic of optimism bias. Specifically, it documents the various methods recommended to mitigate the phenomenon and highlights quantitatively the research undertaken on the subject. Moreover, it introduces paths for further research.

Although they offer major advantages, smart cities present unprecedented risks and challenges. There are abundant discrete studies on risks related to smart cities; however, such risks have not been thoroughly understood to date. This paper is a systematic review that aims to identify the origin, trends, and categories of risks from previous studies on smart cities. This review includes 85 related articles published between 2000 and 2019. Through a thematic analysis, smart city risks were categorized into three main themes: organizational, social, and technological. The risks within the intersections of these themes were also grouped into (1) digital transformation, (2) socio-technical, and (3) corporate social responsibility. The results revealed that risk is a comparatively new topic in smart-city research and that little focus has been given to social risks. The findings indicated that studies from countries with a long history of smart cities tend to place greater emphasis on social risks. This study highlights the significance of smart city risks for researchers and practitioners, providing a solid direction for future smart-city research.

Purpose: Adverse situations negatively impact project stakeholders’ engagement. Past research has sporadically investigated adverse situations affecting stakeholder engagement but lacks a thorough empirical investigation. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approach: A web survey was designed to address the knowledge gap of the identification of the impactful adverse situations during multi-stakeholder engagement. The research yielded 144 completed responses from multi-stakeholders engaged in globally distributed ICT projects.Findings: Exploratory factor analysis revealed eight factors that underpin 26 adverse situations. The top factors, ranked in terms of importance according to their Relative Importance Index (RII) are: dysfunctional conflicts, dearth of reasoning, glitches in project governance, clash of personalities.Research limitations/implications: This research reveals the factors that can impact engagement in the form of meaningful clusters and dimensions and opens-up a future research agenda toward causation and mitigation studies related to adversarial stakeholder engagement. The study focuses on globally distributed ICT projects and has not explored generalizability in other sectors.Practical implications: This research enables project managers and stakeholder analysts to get an understanding on the importance of different dimensions of adverse situations in the way stakeholders think, act and emote.Social implications: Awareness on the potential adversarial stakeholder engagement helps in effectively managing the sustained stakeholder relationships and mental well-being of project stakeholders.Originality/value: This research contributes to project management practice, as it reveals the underlying factors of adverse situations occurring during multi-stakeholders’ engagement, provides clarity on their components and ranks them in terms of importance for their overall effect on stakeholders’ engagement.