This paper investigates the relative importance of project management competences across the different stages of a software project life cycle to identify competence development gaps and opportunities.A deductive and quantitative approach was adopted to address our research questions with a web-based survey for data collection.After reviewing the context of competences and project management competences, the importance of the project management competences overall and for specific stages in the project life cycle was analysed. The result highlights that functional and meta-competences are perceived to be the most important competence dimensions for software project practitioners.This study makes three contributions. First, it consolidates PM competences into a set of 20 within four competence dimensions. Second, it prioritises these competences across the software project life cycle. Third, it identifies the significance of the inter-relationship between project management competences and project life cycle to reveal project management competence development gaps and opportunities.<br/
