Training on the project: a quantifying approach to competence development

Abstract

In the project ‘Competence-Driven Project Portfolio Analysis’ (CDPPA), an integrated system for supporting R&D project selection, staff assignment and activity scheduling with special consideration of the strategic development of competencies has been designed and implemented prototypically. The system has been field-tested at the Electronic Commerce Competence Center (EC3), a public–private partnership R&D enterprise. Experiences from this trial application are summarised and discussed, particularly concerning data collection and competence measurement, the benefits and limits of the chosen multi-criteria decision analysis approach, the evaluation of introduced changes to the decision-making processes, and the transparency of the formal planning model and its components.

Keywords:

• decision support
• knowledge management practice
• knowledge utilisation
• measurement
• case study

Acknowledgements

Financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through grant L264-N13 is gratefully acknowledged.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karl A Froeschl

About the authors

Christian Stummer holds the Chair of Innovation and Technology Management and is Academic Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship, both at Bielefeld University in Germany. He has a Ph.D. in Economics and Social Sciences from the University of Vienna. He was Associate Professor (University of Vienna) until 2010; Head of Business Research at the Electronic Commerce Competence Center (Vienna); and Visiting Professor at the University of Texas (San Antonio). He has conducted research on multi-objective portfolio analysis and decision support systems, including a wide range of applications.

Walter J. Gutjahr received his Ph.D. in Mathematics and the Habilitation in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Vienna. After being employed at Siemens Corporation in the area of Information Technology, he took a position at the University of Vienna, where he is currently an associate professor. His research interests include optimisation, evolutionary computation, project management, scheduling, and healthcare management. He serves as the coordinator of the working group ‘Operations Research’ in the Austrian Computer Society.

Michaela Denk is a statistical information management specialist in the Statistics Department of the International Monetary Fund in Washington DC, and has research cooperations with the University of Vienna. During the CDPPA project, she was Senior Researcher at the EC3 (Vienna). She holds Master's and Doctoral degrees in Statistics from the University of Vienna, with a specialisation in statistical meta-information and data integration. Her current research is on statistical data analysis, (meta-)data management, and evaluation and improvement of data quality.

Harald Riedmann studied sociology, philosophy, history, and political science at the University of Vienna (Master's of Art in sociology, 1987). He did his postgraduate studies (political science) at the Vienna Institute for Advanced Studies. Between 1992 and 1996, he was affiliated with the research institute ‘Wissenschaftskollektiv Wien’. He has been Co-founder and Board co-director (since 1999) of the extra-universitary ‘Vienna Knowledge Net’. He has conducted research on general questions of societal and epistemiological problems, social effects caused by the New Media, and information technology, especially in the realms of education and research.

Karl A. Froeschl is an associate professor in Business Informatics holding a Doctoral degree in Economics and Social Sciences from the University of Vienna. He has conducted research and lectured on statistical meta-information management, applied computer science, e-commerce, and history of computing. He was Research Director of the Vienna-based public–private partnership technology transfer enterprise EC3 (the E-Commerce Competence Center) between 2002 and 2007. He has been Treasurer of the Austrian Computer Society since 2007. He has also been involved in several exhibition, administration, and industry projects.