The Erasmus+ ProDiT: Projects for the Digital Transformation project has started in January 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel restrictions forced the project to kick-off online in January 2021; during this meeting all 21 partners (5 universities, 6 associations, 8 SMEs and 2 enterprises) could first time in the project runtime introduce themselves to each other. Thanks to the Digital Education Ecosystem (DEE) of the project, the ProDiT project team co-organised two conference series in 2021: Dortmund IRC and IEEE E-TEMS 2021, the latter one was attended by 68 “virtual” participants. The DEE contribution to cross-border projects became a focus of the first original project publication of ProDiT. Later on the DEE team co-organised the first Train-the-Trainer event, which took place in a hybrid form in November 2021 in Dortmund. The main scope of the event became the trainings on using IT platforms, agile and the Open Community of Practice (OpenCoP) methodologies for project materials development. The hybrid format of the event allowed 48 participants to actively engage in training activities.
The mentioned OpenCoPs involve lecturers, scientists and company experts, and furthermore, master and PhD students. The immediate benefit is the use of the results in their learning, teaching and research. The number of OpenCoPs varied during the project runtime, eventually forming 10 OpenCoPs: 1 OpenCoP on OpenCoPs focusing on centralised guidelines and concepts development, 1 OpenCoP on DEE and 1 OpenCoP on Educational & Didactic Concepts development, 4 OpenCoPs on content development (WP2 Implementation of Standards & Content) and 3 OpenCoPs, in which the educational content was developed (WP3 Implementation of Educational Resources).
The pandemic has also postponed the on-site meetings and interviews with industry partners to the beginning of 2022. In short, the 2022 became a break-through year after the pandemic restrictions finally slowed down: 2 conferences, 2 Train-the-Trainer events, 3 pilot teaching events, 2 workshops and 2 Tech Talks were co-organised by the ProDiT project members, and mostly in the onsite or hybrid forms. The first big event in 2022 – IEEE E-TEMS 2022 – attracted even more participants than before: 84 people attended the virtual event organised in Bilbao. Later in April, a first pilot teaching kicked off in a hybrid format uniting 46 students and 3 teachers from FH Dortmund and UPV/EHU, as well as 2 PhD students from KU Leuven and NTNU. The experience of this pilot teaching on “Agile virtual cross-border projects” became an input for two conference papers presented in Barcelona and Vienna in the fall 2022, as well as for a workshop during the SEFI 2022 conference, attended by appr. 50 people.
In summer, during the Dortmund IRC 2022 conference in Dortmund, a new ProDiT dissemination format was launched – TechTalk, which was organised together with four ProDiT industry partners; the event attracted ca. 70 participants (excl. online participants). Another dissemination activity took place beginning of July at the Congress on Project Management and Engineering in Barcelona, where 25 participants took part in a hybrid workshop on Digital Sustainability Canvas. In parallel, in frames of the Dortmund International Summer School, the next on-site Train-the-Trainer workshop took place which welcomed 42 lecturers, trainers, PhD students, and researchers on project-based education.
Other two pilot teaching events took place end of August – beginning of September at NTNU, Trondheim. The pilots were devoted to “Managing Digital Change” (APODE educational package) and “Lifecycle thinking and assessment” (SDT educational package). These events united 17 students, 3 PhD students, and 5 teachers from FH Dortmund, KU Leuven, UPV/EHU, and NTNU, and were supported on site by the company partners mpool, SOKwadraat, and online by IHOBE and Kaunas STP.
2022 was accomplished by kicking-off the TechTalk series in December in form of webinars for a wider spread of project insights, stories and digital transformation cases from partners. The series run till June 2023 involving 6 speakers from ProDiT partners; all 4 webinars attracted ca. 60 participants and this number is still growing since the recordings were later used in various teaching and workshop materials development, e.g., as in case with the taxonomy workshop in 2023. The TechTalk series of events was closed in the hybrid form again but in Kaunas during the IEEE E-TEMS 2023 Conference: 4 talks were given by local industry representatives during the conference, which was attended in total by 81 participants (onsite and virtually). The conference became a dissemination channel for 2 ProDiT conference papers, one of which was written on the ProDiT case study – this paper also took a “Best Paper” award.
The 2023 was fruitful for workshops: in July a “Digital Sustainability Canvas for Digital Transformation projects” workshop took place at the congress organised by the ProDiT partner AEIPRO; the event was attended by appr. 50 congress participants. Following the same format, another workshop on “Digital Transformation Maturity Model” (DTMM) took place during the IEEE IDAACS 2023 Conference in September but in Dortmund. During the 2day-workshop 14 participants were applying the DTMM guideline to the provided by ProDiT partner case, who were later celebrated by awarding the IEEE certificates. On the last day of the IEEE IDAACS 2023, the Conference Committee celebrated a “Best Young Author Paper Award” given to the Conference Paper also written on the ProDiT case study. September 2023-series of events was accomplished by a Taxonomy workshop and Consortium meeting in Dortmund, attended by 26 people (mostly onsite). In the fall 2023 “Digital Sustainability Canvas” (DSC) topic became again a topic of the project activities but in Bilbao: this time a pilot teaching event addressed 20 UPV master students applying a case from a project partner to the DSC tool.
The last project year of ProDiT became a dissemination year: the year was opened by a presentation at the Erasmus+ Project Event, which attracted 49 presenters and over 300 registered participants. During the year, the project results were presented at 5 international conferences, taking place in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Portugal, South Africa and USA; the latter one brought one more “Best Paper” to the ProDiT trophy cabinet. Moreover, a series of pilot teaching and consortia meetings took place during the year across different countries: in April a pilot teaching event took place in Azerbaijan thanks to existing synergies with partner projects; during this pilot lectures from 2 ProDiT educational packages were given by teachers from Dortmund and Bilbao. Later, 24 project participants came together in Bilbao (onsite and online) for another pilot and consortium meeting. At the end of August, ProDiT could be discovered by 74 participants from 20 universities/13 countries taking part in the International Summer Convention (ISC) 2024 in Dortmund; in addition, this event served a platform for the last Train-the-Trainer and consortium meetings taking place during the ProDiT project runtime. Last but not least, beautiful Bilbao became a last location for a pilot teaching of the project: 50 students from Dortmund and Bilbao could enjoy various workshops and lectures mainly focusing on Agile Management in Virtual Project Environments and Sustainable Digital Transformation, and of course unique international experience.
To enable students to profit from such internationalisation endeavours also in future, ProDiT planned to initiate 4 double-degree master programmes’ agreements as long-term outcomes of the project (in 3years-time after the project) but already in the first half of 2024, 3 such double-degree agreements were signed with KU Leuven and Astana IT University. Spring 2024 gave one more reason to celebrate the ProDiT outcomes – a PhD defence of one of the active project members of the project. On the way to deliver such high-quality results as PhD and master theses, the consortium produced 4 papers accepted/published in 2024 in high-ranked international journals, e.g. taxonomies of Competence Models and for Effective Digital Transformation Project Implementation; and more to come as some of project results are in the finalising or review processes.
In addition to the mentioned events and activities, throughout the project runtime the ProDiT consortium produced 12 original project publications, 28 related to the project research publications and 20 supervised theses (1 on bachelor, 17 on master and 2 on PhD levels). These and other deliverables of the project like outcome and standard specifications, outcome reports, guidelines and educational packages materials can be checked on the ProDiT webpage and ProDiT Digital Portal. All resources available on the project website and portal have gone through a quality management process, facilitated by the Internal Evaluation Board (IEB), which took place more than 12 times to review and release the project materials.
Although the ProDiT project is over, but the results are still evolving in form of new publications, partnerships, double degree agreements and projects, building up on experiences collected throughout the ProDiT runtime. One of such examples is the NomadTrail project – Virtual Projects for European Digital Natives. And as usually, we invite you to stay tuned and get in touch whenever you want to encounter researching, teaching and living the Digital Transformation together.
