What makes projects complex

Lastly, leadership and expertise go hand-in-hand. If you can lead, you can deliver. Leadership is all about guiding, directing and motivating your team to do their best work and understand how their tasks contribute to the overall vision. Leadership comes with experience. Neither skills can be taught.

They develop overtime from real-life, practical experience. Having these essential skills is the backbone for identifying what makes a project complex and how to navigate the water. A project may be broken down into the most perfectly manageable mini-projects, but without clear documentation on the individual pieces and how they relate to the whole, the project remains opaque and complex to anyone aside from the main project manager.

Clear, up-to-date documentation is the insurance against this issue. As the project manager it is your job to document everything. Every week send out a project status to the full team. By providing clear documentation, both your team and your stakeholders can stay informed throughout the entire project lifecycle.

Understanding the why brings clarity to the goal s of the project. It allows the entire team to find ways to innovate and bring their own areas of expertise to the table. Project Managers tend to focus on delegating tasks. Our minds fall into a divide and conquer mindset. As the leader, you are expected to paint the bigger picture of the project for your team. If we are constantly delegating tasks without clearly defined goals, our team will fail.

It is important to pick our heads up and continuously clarify project goals. When your team understands their roles and the task at hand, they are able to dive directly into execution mode. Clarifying your goals to ensure your project works remained aligned with the initial premise - not just once, but continuously. Remember and accept that you will not know all the answers, but push to explore all possible outcomes and what that would mean for the project.

When navigating complex challenges, teams often find themselves bogged down in the project details. To create more visibility within a project, adapt a project management tool that works best for you, your team and your client. This tool will allow everyone on the project to stay informed and see what is happening.

Use this as your single source of information. Managing Complex Projects The below observations are purely personal, distilled from my experiences managing a diverse range of complex IT projects in 17 countries, during the past 20 years.

What makes a Project Complex? There are a myriad of factors that may contribute to project complexity. The five factors not in order that have contributed most complexity to the projects that I have encountered are as follows: 1.

Technical Complexity: Historically, much of the complexity in managing IT projects was perceived as being related to technical complexity. In reality, much complexity emanated from the immaturity of the IT industry, and the resultant absence of education, organisation and standards.

The existing body of knowledge was limited. However, as the IT industry has matured, so too has the associated body of knowledge. This often requires complex master schedules to align interconnected tasks, resources and teams. Political Environment. Complex projects often involve some interaction with local, federal and state government or public policy. Particularly when political parties disagree on priorities, the environment or public needs, complexity follows.

Global Connectivity and Speed of Transmission. In an interconnected world, information, actions and consequence flow at accelerated pace. The accumulation of minor delays often escalates into unintended consequence, making holistic real-time assessment a critical imperative for success.

Crafting detailed plans with the right skills in place help ensure any project succeeds. But, complex projects require more. Maintaining program management agility and adaptability makes dealing with uncertainty possible. And, setting up correctly in the beginning gives you a fighting chance to win. Analysis and Information at the Ready. Then, a strategy can be put in place—a complexity map of sorts— that sufficiently defines dependencies to manage major elements.

Having the right information available at this beginning phase is critical to making timely corrections in the right sequence. Once complexity factors are identified, you can prioritize and plan, understanding enough of your subject matter to capture and create an executable, feasible, practical schedule.

An executable schedule means all the dependencies that you know are defined to the best of your ability. Doing this without micromanaging or trying to predict everything that will happen is key.

In many ways, less is more. Increased visibility across planning, scheduling and execution allows you to take proactive steps. During the planning phase, the goal is to set the project up in a way that gives correctly sized and located buffers the best chance to protect your project network.

During scheduling, the goal is to create the best allocation of resources with the least disruption across all projects in a portfolio. Contingency Plans in Place. In complex project management, planning is everything. The key is to allot enough time, protection, buffering and capital while still maintaining control.

Critical Junctures Identified and Managed. Like a firework that fails to shoot upward, but burns and sparkles across the ground, one fluctuation and the network of dependencies allow deviations to run rampant through your projects neural network causing chaos. Portfolio and Project Managers anticipate this by identifying and managing critical junctures.

This is where having intelligent feedback from these protective buffers is important to signal when and when not to intervene. Finally there might be other constraints including around the project budget that increase complexity. Read Next: Complexity in Mega IT Projects which is about building a 7-star hospital and defines complexity in a different way or are you Struggling to implement PM software?

You have to realize that things are going to change. Being flexible and willing to adapt is a really important skill but something hard to do, especially if you have a plan that you want to follow. Tera shared a situation where her team had not been flexible and they had lost the client.

As a project manager you have immense power to do something about those signals. The same goes for lots of in-house project sponsors. While some companies do train sponsors on what their role is, most project sponsors, in-house or otherwise, have no clue about what they are supposed to do on a project and why they are there. Working together is a great way to help shake out those relationships. Tera also gave a tip about how to make the collaboration work.

She recommended mapping out how the project is going to unfold and the key points, especially where you need input from stakeholders. Then you can get it out and show people, using it to help them understand the work. Collaboration and teamwork are one of top project management competencies you need to be able to excel at the job. Process maps are a good project communication tool, especially if you do what Tera suggested and have a printed out version that you can spread on a conference room table.

That face-to-face communication and being hands on is so different from virtual communication tools. Tera pointed out that today we rely so much on digital means for communications. Be transparent and share, share, share.