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Chapter 1
Complexity in Project Management and the Management of Complex Projects
Terry Cooke-Davies
In some ways, complexity is rather like love: Everybody has experiences of it and knows what it is, but ask them to define precisely what they mean by it and you will end up with a broad range of definitions. In the realm of project management, the terms âcomplexâ and âcomplexityâ have been cropping up extensively during the past few years.
In order to shed some light on the topic, Project Management Institute hosted a series of four Academic-Business Roundtable Discussions and Workshops on the topic of âComplexity in Project Management and the Management of Complex Projects.â These sessions were held in Atlanta, GA, Sydney, Australia, St. George's, Malta, and SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil. Nearly 100 attendees at each location, heard from a panel of six invited presenters. The participants were then invited to take part in an open discussion and workshop session. The presenters were composed of businesspeople, project management practitioners, academics, and consultants.
These events, and the lively discussions that took place during them, were the inspiration for this book. Presenters and delegates offered insights that were as varied in their topics as they were well grounded in practice, in theory or in both. In the course of the dialogue, it emerged that managing projects in an increasingly complex world is both a growing challenge, and one for which no easy solutions exist. The field itself is multifaceted, continually evolving and in pressing need of expert practitioners, supportive organizational environments, and well-grounded research to support both.
This first chapter provides an understanding of complexity in project management as it emerged from the presentations and discussions at each of the four events. Made up, as it is, of the insights from 19 distinguished practitioners, managers, consultants, and academics, it inevitably has something of the âscatter gunâ about it. It also does not include references and citations, since the points it is making all emerged during the events themselves from one of the participants. For ease of reading, a single âvoiceâ has been adopted for the narrative, to present the breadth of ideas as coherently as possible. Subsequent chapters, which each elaborate on a particular theme introduced during the discussions, have the added depth and understanding of the expert authors and refer to the source of the information.
What Do People Mean When They Talk About Complexity?
As far as projects are concerned, there is a difference between âcomplexâ and âcomplicated.â It doesn't help to look up the dictionary definitions of the words, since each tends to be defined in terms of the other. If sense is to be made of the topic, then it is important to understand the concepts that people tend to have in mind when they use the terms, rather than educate them in one or the other particular dictionary definitions.
Similarly, although the term âcomplexâ has a technical meaning (or, to be precise, several different ones) when it is applied to âcomplex systemsâ in the worlds of science and technology, these technical definitions (which will be explored in Chapter 4) should also be distinguished from the everyday sense in which people speak about complex projects. Furthermore, they should seek to assess the degree of âcomplexityâ that any particular project or program can be said to possess.
You could describe a system or a project as âcomplicatedâ if it has a large number of interconnected and interdependent parts, whereas complex means something more. The Latin roots of the word imply âwoven together,â so that changes in one part have an impact on the others. If this âwoven togethernessâ is combined with changes that can occur within individual elements, then a project can be said to be complex if it consists of many interdependent parts, each of which can change in ways that are not totally predictable, and which can then have unpredictable impacts on other elements that are themselves capable of change.
You could say that a modern saloon car or a laptop is complicated, whereas a Formula 1 racing car or the human brain is complex. As one of the contributors said, âIf you don't understand what will happen when you kick itâthat's complex.â
Aside from being a memorable way of describing complexity, this particular description also introduces a second important concept alongside the interaction of multiple partsâthat of human âunderstanding.â Many activities or fields of knowledge appear to be complex when they are first encountered, but as understanding and experience grow, they appear much less complex to the accomplished practitioner. To many beginner drivers or people with no knowledge of the workings of an internal combustion engine, a saloon car is daunting in its complexity, whereas it holds few mysteries for the drivers and engineers in a Formula 1 racing team. Thus, a single project might appear to be more or less complex to different people associated with it, such as the project sponsor or the project manager.
Complexity, then, is relative to an individual's understanding. But what about collective understanding? There are limits to the understanding of groups of people, organizations, professions, and even of humanity itself. This would suggest that complexity is a characteristic that is always encountered in endeavors or activities at the frontier of the knowledge or technology of the people who are undertaking the activity. Projects to build ancient wonders of the world such as the Pyramids or Stonehenge must have appeared complex in their time, but look very simple in contrast with NASA's programs leading to human flight to the moon, or some of the intricate and complex building and infrastructure projects that have been undertaken in the modern era.
On the other hand, the different components that make up the global economy are themselves complex elements that change unpredictably and then interact in unpredictable ways. As a result, in the postindustrial global world, apparently simple concepts such as a single integrated business appear to be increasingly complex, difficult to manage, and prone to failure.
The tools and techniques of modern project management were developed to help people and organizations reduce the amount of complexity in projects by breaking complex activities down into simpler ones wherever possibleâthereby designing complexity out of the project as far as possible and leaving the resulting activity simply complicated. Removing complexity remains a laudable goal, and it should be the first resort for many project managers. However, a combination of the ambition that keeps humanity constantly pressing onward to new frontiers, coupled with increasing complexity in the global economy, ensures that there will always be projects that present their promoters and implementers with a high degree of complexity.
If projects with a substantial amount of complexity are also likely to have aspects that need to be managed in ways that extend the traditional tools and techniques of project management, then just what factors can be identified that cause a particular project to be âcomplexâ in this common sense use of the term? And what challenges do these pose for project managers?
What Causes Complexity, and Why Is It a Problem?
Many organizations have developed their own means of assessing how complex a project is for varied reasons, such as assisting with the appointment of appropriate management or governance resources or positioning it within a portfolio of projects that are being considered for funding. Typically, such assessment schemes consider factors such as technology, size and scale, supply chain, geography, time pressure, stakeholders, and so on. The lists are long and varied.
Research into categorization systems has shown that organizations typically rate a project using, on average, 5 attributes, although the number of attributes can vary from as few as 2 to as many as 12. Factors assessed may include project scope, technical complexity, number of functions and skills involved, organizational involvement, level of ambiguity/uncertainty, number of sites locations or countries, organizational impact, clarity of goals and objectives, or source and location of risks.
Some organizations, recognizing that complexity depends on understanding, consider how familiar it is with the particular type, scale, or technology of the project.
It is worth looking into the different factors in this long and varied list and that can be said to cause complexity, and consequently, problems for project managers.
Unhelpful Behavior
There is widespread agreement among practitioners that one factor that makes projects complex is the interaction of human beings who are faced with making complex decisions. Complexity occurs when people with different interests, loyalties, cultures, and interactions with one another are put together to deliver a particular project or program. This can be seen as variants on âorganizational politics,â but it is actually more widespread than that.
All but the simplest projects involve teams of people coming together to accomplish goals, and when physical teams come together, unpredictable behavior emerges. The larger the team, and the larger the number of teams involved, the more complex the project. People are not always rational in their decision making, and tribal instincts are deeply rooted in humankind, which makes the behavior of individual teams liable to evolve and be difficult to predict. In addition, the interactions between different teams are themselves unpredictable, especially if there are differences in national, organizational, or professional culture.
These differences are often magnified by the different perspectives of the people involved: Those who are implementing the projects, those who will use the products or services that result from the project, those who stand to benefit from the success of the project, or those who establish the regulatory environment for the project.
Complexities like these in human behavior can reveal themselves in many different ways, for example: Clients of projects can cause changes to project scope, delay important decisions, interfere with the project implementation team, or complicate actions and decisions through a lack of trust; the workforce that is implementing the project can become disincentivized through poor morale or exhausted through excessive schedule pressure; and managers can react inappropriately to cost, schedule, scope, or quality pressures. Indeed, in projects with a high degree of complexity, communication can be a significant cause of failure. This is perhaps not surprising, since the need to communicate, relate, and interact is a basic human need. Such processes of relating are complex and responsive, because interaction among humans is always unpredictable to some extent.
Anyone who has ever been involved in large-scale organizational change will most likely have experienced for himself or herself what happens when the rumor begins to circulate that reorganization is imminent. The complex human system begins to evolve, to react in unpredictable ways, and to develop its own response in anticipation of the announcement. On the other hand, when a fleet of contractorsâ vehicles rolls up to start a major roadwork scheme with an inanimate system such as a road network, the roads don't react!
Project managers can expect to be faced with such behavioral complexity, but their own response can create additional complexity of its own. Responding to disruption by taking decisions that seek to recover the original planned schedule can lead to feedback loops, with unintended consequences and even, on occasions, catastrophic failure. This response is a particular manifestation of a phenomenon that is well understood in the systems view of the world, and one that is a major cause of complexity in projects: systemicity.
Failure to Appreciate Systemicity
When people talk about projects being complex, as we have seen, they are talking about not only the number of separate elements in the project but also about how these interact. In other words, about the behavior of the project as a âwhole systemââwhat could be called the âsystemicityâ of the project.
When project managers look at projects, they are used to breaking them down into their constituent parts (e.g., using work breakdown structures). However, when feedback loops begin to develop, quite simple behaviors in each element can combine and cause complex behavior to emerge for the system as a whole. Perhaps the easiest of these effects to imagine is positive reinforcing loops, or âvicious circles.â It is frequently encountered in amateur events making somewhat inexpert use of public address systems. The voice of the announcer is amplified through the loudspeakers, and this louder voice is picked up by the microphone and amplified further, and so on until the familiar ear-splitting âhowlâ results.
Similar effects can be experienced on complex projects, as unintended consequences from well-intended decisions result in the magnification and escalation of the original problems, until catastrophic failure results.
A pattern can be detected: project risks or perturbations create interactions that feed on themselves causing vicious circles; project managers respond to the disruption by making decisions that seek to retain planned delivery and planned quality, usually by accelerating certain actions; these actions are also disruptions that, in turn, must be contained within a shorter time scale, therefore, increasing the power of the vicious circles.
Models
Each of us interacts with the world as we understand it to be, based on our own mental âmodelsâ of what reality is and how it works. Most commonly, these models are more implicit than explicit, and they are likely to differ in important respects from other people's models. This diversity of models can be a major factor in causing complexity in projects.
Arising out of our models, we use symbols that are created, reproduced, and transformed by our interactions, and out of these symbols, we create and re-create meaning. That meaning in turn informs and directs what we do, so if our models are left intuitive and unexamined, they are likely to lead to unforeseen systemic effects at interfaces within the project.
Here, creating explicit shared models throughout the project team can help to improve understanding of the complexity inherent in the project. Conversely, having inadequate models that, for example, fail to recognize the extent of complexity in the project makes dealing with it that much harder.
Simplistic Project Management
One mental model that most project managers bring with them to the management of complex projects and programs is their understanding of the tools and techniques of project management. Where these are incomplete or inappropriate, they can add to project complexity. For example, a simplistic model of project risk management that fails to recognize systemic risks caused by the interactions between individual risks, or that fails to identify the significant risks, can contribute directly to a need for the kind of decision making and behavior that causes the kind of issues with systemicity that have already been described.
Complexity can also arise because of assumptions that are inherent in traditional models of project management and that are incompatible with actual systems and practices in the organizational environment of the specific project or program. For example, project managers may lack the authority necessary to manage the project effectively.
None of this, of course, is any excuse for failing to implement the âbasicsâ of project management and use the tools and techniques in an appropriate manner to reduce avoidable complexity.
Over-Ambitious Strategic Management
A number of factors lead to increased complexity in projects in business and government. At least in the Western economies, the work force is aging while simultaneously the number and value of projects being undertaken are increasing.
Against this background, projects are managed and governed within a context created by the management and governance systems of the promoting and implementing organizations, and the resulting âsystem of systemsâ adds a further dimension to the systemicity that has already been discussed.
So too does the number of interactions (or âripple effectsâ) between projects undertaken within a project portfolio aimed to accomplish strategic business objectives, particularly when a number of projects independently are each intended to create business change that has to be managed and integrated at the point of delivery by the same business unit's operational staff.
Other Factors
The foregoing may be five of the most prominent factors that come to mind when seeking to understand the causes of complexity, but there are many others as well.
For example, project management training that reduces all the tasks of a project manager to a simple and straightforward rational, linear, and deterministic set of predefined processes and activities, tends to increase the challenges of systemicity by developing project personnel who are not on the lookout for the project's interconnectedness.
In the global marketplace today, supply chains frequently consist of people and organizations from very different geographical and ethnic cultures, which place great challenges on the social systems that need to be created within a complex project. In addition, the same forces that lead to such culturally diverse supply chains place great pressure on the expectations of superior project results, creating what often turns out to be unrealistic stakeholder expectations and can lead to time pressure and resultant systemic problems and/or stress on members of the project team with a consequential increase in unhelpful behavior.
In general terms, insights from the study of complexity in the life sciences suggests that there is a natural tendency for all organisms (including humankind and its âsocialâ organisms such as project teams) to evolve complex responses to challenges that they encounter in their environment. Which, taken together with the causes we have just examined, provide a compelling argument for why there is a pressing need for a coherent research agenda to understand both the causes of complexity, and what can be done to prevent it resulti...
