As projects grow in complexity, managing their construction and planning becomes crucial. Understanding project complexity is vital, as it directly influences decision-making and goal achievement. Thereby impacting project success. Complexity affects planning and control by making goal identification more challenging. This leads to negative project outcomes.
Project complexity is the difficulty in understanding, foreseeing, and controlling a project’s behavior, despite having enough information.
Identifying sources and factors contributing to project complexity is crucial for project managers. Organizations must navigate decisions and actions amidst many unknown variables marked by discontinuity and dynamism. In projects exhibiting characteristics of complex systems, the methods to manage impact areas cannot be predicted in advance. It emerges from the interactions between the project elements and the environment.
In today’s blog, I’ll guide you through understanding the impact areas in project construction by exploring dimensions related to project complexity.
A. Uncertainty about the scope of the project
The real crux of project management is planning. Proactive planning can minimize the impact of uncertainties, even though they are unpredictable. As the saying goes, with the absence of a plan, you are in fact planning to fail. But not all plans work, which is why an alternate plan B should be in the picture.
Strategies such as maintaining a fixed scope, overestimating completion times, and simplifying estimations create flexibility for uncertainties. This reduces their impact.
Let’s look at uncertainties in the following three methods of project behaviour
1. Fixed Schedule, Fixed Scope- When the scope is truly fixed, the schedule is subject to uncertainty. This method works well by adding 30% buffer time for projects in which repetitive tasks are to be developed.
2. Fixed Schedule, Adjustable Scope – The Agile method manages such projects by focusing on what can truly be controlled: the schedule. Scrum projects work in short cycles to deliver modest increments of scope, allowing frequent changes in scope as well as priority. Within each cycle, we adjust the scope as needed.
3. No Schedule, Unknown Scope – Uncertainties are greatest when the scope is unknown at the start. Another agile process, Kanban which focuses on constraining work-in-progress is useful for such scenarios.
B. Significant change in the scope of the project during its implementation
Although scope changes are bound to occur, there are specific strategies that can mitigate their frequency. These include:
- Meticulously documenting each scope alteration
- Establishing a structured approval process
- Laying out a foundational framework for the project
- Defining clear acceptance criteria
- Developing a detailed work breakdown structure
- Utilizing project management software to oversee scope changes.
If there are no processes in place to manage the scope changes, the projects suffer in many ways. We must build our house on a strong foundation to secure it from the unplanned changes.
C. High number of stakeholders with influence on the project
In situations with many stakeholders, reconciling conflicting goals and incorporating diverse ideas into development can be challenging. Project management should consider each stakeholder’s level of interest in the project’s development.
Project management in such cases should consider the degree of interest and influence each stakeholder in the project development. The type of information to be provided to different stakeholders based on their involvement becomes a necessity to avoid confusion and too many suggestions.
Ambiguity in stakeholder expectations can arise when individuals have expertise in specific areas but lack discipline in others. For instance, an IT expert may have differing views from the legal team. Clear communication from project managers is essential to align stakeholders. To prevent breakdowns, establish definite communication protocols as part of the project management process.
While stakeholders may propose changes, it’s essential to ensure that each suggested change contributes to the project’s success. Outlining the goals and then prioritizing the changes helps dealing with the conflicts in an effective way. Ambiguity in such cases can always be settled by knowing the group of stakeholders who are actually funding the particular project.
Ambiguity in such cases can always be settled by knowing the stakeholders who are funding the project. They would have the final say. In a way that makes space for some more clarity. In any ambiguous situation, a project manager must go to a high enough level within that organization and get an answer.
Explore how we helped a manufacturer boost productivity by 30% and ensured timely project completion with AI-driven automation.
D. Novelty of the project / technology
Project novelty refers to how new a project is for the firm or team, based on its unique characteristics. Technological novelty involves integrating new functionalities into existing technologies. Factors which increase the novelty in a project include:
- Technology familiarity,
- Technology newness,
- Discontinuous technology changes
- Platform changes and scope changes.
Sometimes a client pitches the technology he is using even if it’s old or irrelevant while there are better technologies available to be used for the project. All these factors increase the degree of project novelty.
But project novelty is not all negative.
Project novelty offers an addition to the organization’s capability analysis. It builds off an established premise that the movement from no experience to some experience is crucial. It also extends from the premise that a more detailed evaluation of project attributes is important to understand the appropriateness and applicability of the organization’s capability sets. Employee training programs, cross-domain knowledge, periodic skill audits of the individuals can help significantly in reducing the project novelty.
E. High interdependence between the technologies
Technological interdependence can be understood as the degree to which various parts of the organization need to exchange information as well as materials to complete their essential tasks. There are three major types of technological interdependence:
1. Pooled interdependence: In this approach, teams complete their tasks by aggregating the separate efforts of each member. Each unit or team operates autonomously, yet their collective contributions are crucial to the overall success of the project.
This leads to an indirect sort of dependence on the performance of others in which the failure of one department may cause the failure of the process as a whole process.
Standardization becomes important in pooled interdependence for better coordination between the teams involved. If all the team members decide to follow a set of rules and processes, the output of every team member can contribute to the result, that is, the completion of the task. The standardized process can be kept unchanged if the situation is stable. Along with the standardization, centralized communication channels should also be developed and maintained to avoid any communication breakdown between the teams involved.
2. Sequential interdependence: Within this type, one unit needs to complete a certain task before the succeeding unit can start working. In this interdependence, team members rely on each other in predictable ways for the flow of information, work and decisions. In sequential interdependence, each person/team must complete their task before anyone later in the sequence can start with theirs.
Planning is essential while tackling the sequential interdependence. The planning must include coordinating schedules, deadlines, and other relevant information at the beginning of the process and outlining cases where the process might need to change.
3. Reciprocal interdependence: The most complex situation is reciprocal interdependence, in which one unit’s outputs become inputs to another unit and vice versa. Team members need to adjust to each other’s actions as the situation changes.
Reciprocal interdependence is likely to require greater efforts at horizontal coordination than do the other two types of interdependence.
Mutual adjustment helps in facing reciprocal interdependence. At any given time, any team member should be allowed to introduce new information which might affect the model of coordination between the team members or the teams. This approach can handle most of the uncertainty, but it also has the greatest risks too.
F. High difficulty in achieving performance goals
Achieving performance goals – be it for the individual contributors or even for an organization – requires efforts and continuous adherence to the process. Performance goals are achieved when individual contributors start perceiving the organization’s goals as important, achievable and adds value not just to the organization but also to their self-growth by the degree of fulfillment they feel at every success of the organization.
On the other hand, organizations should also focus on the growth of their individual contributors to be more equipped against the impact areas like project novelty and tackle tough situations like technological interdependence.
Not keeping specific and measurable goals makes them unattainable / unachievable. Performance goals should be realistic, relevant, result-oriented, and most importantly time-bound.
An organization is a group of people either with common goals or a group of people who understand and can relate with each other’s goals.
So, there you have it!
Understanding these dimensions affecting the project construction and planning can create a space for analysis on several levels ranging from the individuals to the organization. The analysis of these dimensions enables the organization, managers and individuals to better understand the estimations and practicality of the deliverables.
It is a known fact that only certain projects are complex. Still, all projects have a lifecycle, and most projects undergo a phase of complexity. Project complexity can help understand the dynamic nature of technological advancements and the stakeholders’ perspectives and can also help analyze the unpredictability in the product development journey.
Reach out to us at Nitor Infotech with anything you’d like us to know about this topic.
