Abstract: There were two purposes of this study; first one was to propose a normative process model to the situation where project manager is been replaced in IT projects, and the second one was to increase the knowledge about RPM. The design science research method has been utilized in this study. The empirical portion of this study was gathered by conducting semi-structured interviews with ten supervisors of project managers, because they have the best knowledge in the area. The actual process model was created with the support of Van de Ven & Poole’s (1995) process theories and with the information gained from the interviewees and theoretical framework. The results indicated that if a project is in trouble due to incompetence of project manager, RPM does not give the best result when thinking outside of the project. The normative process model created in this study contains two possibilities; RPM or providing a mentor to support the current PM to finish the project. When project manager can stay in the project and gets help from experienced PM, he or she gets valuable learning experience and same kind of situations can probably be avoided in the future. RPM creates problems when there are lack of processes and instructions in a company about how to run a project. When everyone follows instructions and project documentation is in order, RPM is easier to handle and the project or the project portfolio will not suffer substantially. If project manager is incompetent to run a project, instead of RPM there should be a mentor to guide the project manager in trouble. Educating project managers will help these kinds of situations in the future. Based on the results RPM is not easy to handle and situation is lacking instructions. RPM is not the first solution to save a troubled project and it should be avoided. For future research it would be interesting to research how project manager experiences RPM especially in cases, where project manager does not initiate the replacement.
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