Competency characterisation by means of work situation modelling

Nowadays companies have to face the rapid evolution of their competitive environment. In the field of design, project managers are aware of both the impact of the designers' competencies on the project performance and of the requirement for a fast development of these competencies. However, they have difficulties in updating competency reference banks and then, in correctly matching the available competencies and missions that have to be performed. This issue of competence management mainly concerns competency allocation and project team building. In research literature, numerous research works suffer from poor competence modelling. Even if some authors have linked competence with work situation, there is often a lack of documentation concerning knowledge capturing about a designer's work situation which would help managers characterise competency. In this paper, we present the architecture of a novel approach based on the traceability of design activities which aims at assisting competency characterisation through qualitative features of the work situation in which this competency is activated. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.