Competency and collaboration based project team selection: A systematic and methodological literature review

Size, diversity, competence and cooperation ability of members affect the performance of a project team and thus the success of the project. This article aims to critically review the quantitative and scientific characteristics of the literature on the project team selection problem and to identify the gaps in considered attributes and selection methods for further studies. This review differs from other review studies on project team selection in terms of scope, time horizon, selection criteria and inclusion of bibliometric analyses. 45 publications about the project team selection are selected to review within more than 15,000 ones in June 2024. A five-stage systematic method- including scanning related keywords in databases, setting time period, skimming titles, skimming abstracts with introduction and conclusion parts of the studies and sample selection ensuring uniform representation- is used to identify these studies. Then, the bibliometric data of these publications are analyzed before scientific analyses of the selected publications. It is detected that there is an increasing trend in the number of studies conducted in this field as well as the number of citations to them. It is also observed that mathematical optimization methods are used for small datasets and few constraints, whereas multicriteria decision making, data mining/machine learning and (meta)-heuristic methods are preferred as complexity increases and nonlinearity emerges. In conclusion, there is a need for a comprehensive team selection model considering technical and soft skill requirements with salary and communication costs together. Complexity, accuracy and precision analyses should also be performed to ensure the performance of the proposed model.