Towards a Taxonomy for Project Management Competences

Recent research on project management competences did not use a standard set of competences. Twenty-five publications, published in or after 2000, show little agreement on their competences: of the 353 only twelve percent is named more than once. Of the 353, 31 are linked to communication, but a classification system is lacking to dictate whether they can be grouped (and how). Two taxonomies, the hyperdimensional taxonomy (Tett, Guterman, Bleier, & Murphy, 2000) and the open systems taxonomy (Shrivastava, 2008) are compared to recent research of project management competences and a high percentage of the 353 can be connected to both of them: 93% and 90% respectively. Comparing the work of two researchers (Everts, 2008; Krahn, 2005) with the hyperdimensional and open systems taxonomies, reveals that both taxonomies can be used to compare research on project management competences. The comparison favors the hyperdimensional taxonomy (Tett, Guterman, Bleier, & Murphy, 2000).