Industry 4.0 is an issue that has already reached most companies, although its implementation still varies significantly. This variance is mostly due to the fact that planning and implementing networked technologies in companies requires new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. The approach developed in this paper provides guidance to manufacturing companies to identify and exploit digitally enabled market opportunities and to start a project-based learning process to transform the organization. We propose an approach using only remote guidance for competence building on digital transformation to increase companies’ ability to act. The proposed approach nurtured on existing digital transformation frameworks and agile project management tools suitable to achieve cognitive learning goals from the simple to the difficult, from the straightforward to the complex. By that it mitigates shortcomings with regard to application in practice. An integrated virtual supported training format for companies addresses therefore initial knowledge building, assessment options, derivation of focus areas, development of target scenarios and implementation experience. Numerous theoretical principles on digital transformation can be found in the literature. Approaches that translate these into practical procedures can only be found to a limited extent. Therefore, the originality of this paper is to propose a project- based approach that can enable companies not only to assess their digital maturity level and plan its increase, but at the same time to initiate a learning process for implementation. It enables employees to communicate inside and outside the organization, share knowledge/data and organize joint projects. So that the collaboration between team members of different disciplines is encouraged. The developed approach offers companies the opportunity to launch coordinated holistic initiatives for digital growth. Supported by agile development approaches, this can also be done location-independently in distributed teams. So, the effort for bringing distributed teams together can be reduced and interdisciplinary work is enhanced.