Exploring the Complexity of Projects by Cicmil Svetlana

Author:Cicmil, Svetlana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Project Management Institute

Project dynamics and instability that compromise the attainment of the “triple constraint” imperative over time can be, for the simplification of analysis, considered at two levels. One is the problematic notion of prediction (project estimating and planning) when the long-term future is unpredictable (Atkinson, 1999). This means that the goals of the project and, ultimately, the assessment of the project's outcome as success or failure, will change as underlying conditions change (Fig 3-1). The other is the evolving and unpredictable nature of interaction and cooperation among project participants in the specific project situation in the living present (real-time) that makes specifying project objectives (triple constraint) and planning for methods of work in detail in advance of action (project implementation), problematic. This invokes the consideration of micro-diversity which maintains the stable patterns of relating as well as disturbs them and creates potential for novelty and change (possible technological, human, financial, and other influences that may prompt changes to the original project plan over time, in the process of enacting the plan during implementation). The issue of multiplicity of agendas and complex relationships between people, unavoidable in a multiparty coalition, is also part of such instability over time. The managerial action during project implementation encompassing project control, re-planning, and change (trade-offs within the golden triangle of triple constraints) might be better understood, therefore, as a process of simultaneously dealing with both project implementation and direction where there is no value equilibrium but multiple values and agendas. Otherwise, considering only the narrow triple constraint criteria and ignoring the conditions (situational realty) that define the complexity of a project within which decisions are to be made and the enabling processes of managerial interventions facilitated is, as concluded earlier, problematic and unhelpful.

Utilizing Figure 3-1 and the concept of CRPR, we aim to develop a better understanding of how project managers and project team members experience the described project instability and dynamics and how these are managed and coped with in real project situations in the process of collaborative accomplishment of the project goal. We adopt the CRPR position that everything happens through relational processes among the people involved in project tasks, and through these processes of action and interaction, they jointly transform their environment and their identities while accomplishing the project activity.

Three aspects of project complexity—A summary

We stated in chapter 1 that we are interested in responding to the identified deficiencies and controversies associated with the relevance of the conventional project management research and knowledge system to the challenges in project environments and its practical application at three levels: (1) discrepancy between project management “best practice” recommendations and what is really being collaboratively enacted in practice, i.e., understanding the “un-codified” paradigm that underpins project management practice; (2) paradoxical, unintended consequences for control, communication, and successful management of projects in practice that emerge from following the project management prescriptions in “the book” (i.e., PLC) and marginalizing unpredictability and inevitability of change over time and complex social interaction among actors; and (3) the need for alternative theoretical conceptualisations and thinking about projects and project complexity in practice.

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