Competences and the Digital Transformation

Abstract

People believe that the way we live and work will be transformed—digitally transformed. The proactive attitude toward such change is to be prepared, meaning, it is a very relevant issue to ask for the required competences which enable a person not only to cope with the digital transformation but maybe even to shape and steer it. For the project management community, this raises the question of how the well-elaborated project management competences match with the ones required for the digital transformation. On the one hand, we expect projects to be a major tool for shaping the digital transformation, on the other hand, we expect the way we do projects to be digitally transformed. Besides that pull effect caused by the obvious need for projects and the digital transformation, there is a possible push effect since the project management community could transfer their elaborated and proven view on competences (for project management) into the new domain of the digital transformation. This contribution attempts to structure the topic “competences” with the ambition to document what consequences the digital transformation has for our dealing with competences and what our elaborated systems of competence models, etc., can provide for the definition of the relevant competences for the digital transformation. By defining structures and terminologies, the foundation for a continuous development and iterative refinement of a competence baseline for the digital transformation is laid.