The vast amount of previous research on project management competence does not provide a basis for educational needs. Analyzing previous research poses two challenges: the lack of a uniform list of competences, necessitating a taxonomy, and the use of importance as a criterion, favoring general important competences. Criticality is introduced as the competence a project manager adds to the team. Validation research using criticality and the taxonomy among experienced Dutch project managers is more comprehensive and provides a lesser focus on general important competences than previous research. Criticality focuses more on the essence of the profession.

The work reported on here concentrates on virtual ad hoc expert teams for the integration of learning and working, as ad hoc teams seem to be one way to cope with complexity in a knowledge-intensive society. In order to let ad hoc teams learn and work together, group members require effective communication and shared understanding among each other. Two empirical studies were conducted to study collaborative learning and shared understanding, one exploratory study and one experiment. In the first study, it was explored how virtual design teams work and learn together. Based on conceptual ideas, collaborative learning and shared understanding were observed and assessed in a design team over a period of four months. It was concluded that shared understanding was suboptimal; mainly due to the effect that hardly any questions were raised and answered. The second study elaborates on the need to encourage question-answer patterns and reflective behavior in such teams. A tool was developed that supported questioning behavior. As it was hypothesized that this tool leads to better questioning behavior, which in turn results in more reflective behavior and in increased shared understanding, an experiment was conducted. In the exploratory study, as well as in the experimental study, the perceived shared understanding increased over time. However, in both studies suboptimal questioning behavior and little reflective activity were noticed. The main results of the two empirical studies are compared and discussed.

Without shared understanding, hardly any group learning takes place. Though much has been written about the essence of shared understanding, less is known about how to assess the process of reaching shared understanding. Therefore, the study focuses on ways of assessing shared understanding. A conceptual framework is described that makes a distinction between the process of reaching shared understanding and the resulting shared understanding. The conceptual ideas lead to a coding scheme for observing the processes of shared understanding and to the definition of product measures, among others a scale to assess perceived shared understanding. Then an empirical study is presented, in which the model is applied. A major conclusion is that it was hard to find reflective utterances in the protocols although the coding scheme provided for them.