Managing Complexity in Technology Intensive Projects

As businesses operate in increasingly more complex environments, understanding complexity and its sources is becoming increasingly important. These sources range from internal organizational culture to, technical and social environment in which the business operates, to the competitive dynamics aimed at capturing and maximizing market share. The increasing unpredictability and complexity of unforeseen competitive consequences call for novel methods of planning, execution, and management of business. As organizations confront these changes and attempt to adapt to them, they find that management of technology intensive projects can no longer be viewed as a linear process of planned actions. In these project change agents self organize to accomplish pre-determined goals based on the feedback, emerging circumstances, and to cope with future uncertainty. This process of self organization results in organizational evolution and growth based on generative learning that facilitates continuous improvement through action oriented learnings. In doing so, this increased complexity results in complex adaptive systems increasingly evolving throughout the organization and creating unpredictable changes operating between stability and instability. This paper tackles the issue complexity management in technology intensive projects. It particularly focuses on elements of complexity; role of project managers; and tools, techniques, and models for managing complexities in projects.