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17th Jan 12
Czech Hannsum
What is meant with a complex project? The world when full difference once we talk about intricate projects. Is complexity exactly like complicated? By complex do we just mean a big project, one which will be geographical distributed or perhaps using complex engineering? Or are these types of mega project just more complicated.
Complexity
In Earls’ publication Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our Correct Nature, specifically, his definition of the difference between complicated and complicated:
A jumbo aircraft is complicated; mayonnaise is intricate.
By this I mean, a jumbo jet is made up of millions of small parts. If you only had the time, the patience, the skill plus a good manual, you could take the plane apart and eventually put it back together again. Mayonnaise is different: it is a stabilized suspension? The result from the interaction of it’s ingredients… and the way you add them to one another. You can’t consider mayonnaise apart to produce the original ingredients after which recombine them, as any novice cook knows. So complicated is reducible and recombine-able; mayonnaise neither of those things.
Here is an important lesson: mass behavior is actually inherently complex because it is founded on the interaction of individual agents. But we make an effort to understand it like it were difficult… This is why we battle to understand
I think intricacy is closely related to ambiguity of project goal and approach to delivery, because complexity is due to the challenges associated with planning the project in the first place and likely amount of anticipated change. This complexity makes it impossible to sit down and plan the project in the clear way from begin to end; we need a slightly more flexible way of the traditional “plan the work” “work the particular plan”. This can be represented by a good adaptation of Rodney Turners classic goal method matrix
The higher the levels of ambiguity about the project goal and uncertainty concerning the delivery method make it more difficult to handle in a standard way. This seems more important compared to the pure size from the project. Some large difficult projects have obvious goals and known methods and these may be managed in an exceedingly traditional way. This definition differs from your normal multi organisation; multi-phase definition defined from the APM, but is nevertheless more highly relevant to help take into account the complexity of the projects we manage.
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