Complex Project Management
In 2009 the Project Management Institute PMI announced their book of the year as the publication entitled “Managing Complex Projects, A New Model” declaring it a groundbreaking study of complex project management. In the preface to the book the author writes: “It is now becoming clear that our conventional project management processes are inadequate when managing complex projects. Research is underway by the Project Management Institute, and others to determine what makes projects complex and to learn how to manage project complexity. Many thought leaders in the field of project management are presenting alternative approaches to managing complex projects. We are now realizing that new approaches are desperately needed to manage complex projects in the ever-changing global economic environment.”
The book goes on to talk about how for organizations to survive and thrive in today’s global economy, they must find ways to dramatically improve the performance of large-scale projects. It talks about how applying the concepts of complexity theory can complement conventional project management approaches and enable us to adapt to this new context of having to deliver large scale complex projects under uncertainty and volatility.
A project is a temporary endeavor composed of a set of tasks that are coordinated into achieving a particular result. It is designed to execute on the organization’s strategy. Tasks are integrated into processes to ensure the work is coordinated and completed within a given set of constraints such as time, quality, scope, and budget. Thus projects have a set of boundaries that define them and they take place within a particular environment. Like organizations, projects are systems. They can be simple, linear systems or complex systems. In this section, we are going to talk about the qualitative difference between the two, so as to understand why we need a fundamentally different approach to our traditional project management methods. We will start by talking about the nature of linear standardized projects with some examples.
