Employing the Hidden Competences in Digital Transformation Projects

Forming the right project team by adding team members with the right competences is a key success factor for projects and one of the most important tasks for every project manager. In traditional project management, this task is done before starting the project, based on the existing and known competences of the team members. In digital transformation projects (DTPs), required competences are not known or do not exist before starting the project, meaning, a project team must develop and learn the required competences while doing the project. Therefore, it’s crucial for the success to build a team which has the curiosity and motivation to learn, and which can form the required team dynamics and team culture to do so. Experienced project managers staff the team with people where they “assume” that they will succeed in developing the competences and implementing the project. Hidden competences or competences, which are not directly connected to the project work, give them hints in this respect. Hence, the research objective of this contribution is to figure out how these hidden competences can be used by a project manager to form a successful project team for DTP, which, therefore, will build the required team competence profile over project runtime. To explore this approach systematically, with the help of literature review and a series of interviews conducted with experienced project managers, this paper aims to advance the state of the art in team composition for managing DTPs through the usage of hidden competence concepts. In addition to the current results of this ongoing research, the paper contributes to the future research agenda on the use of hidden competences in team composition scenarios.