CHAPTER 9
,Complexity and Uncertainty in the Project Management Landscape
The design, adaptation, and deployment of project management life cycles and models are based on the changing characteristics of the project and are the guiding principles behind practicing effective project management.
Don't impose process and procedure that stifles team and individual creativity! Rather create and support an environment that encourages that behavior.
— Robert K. Wysocki, Ph.D., President, Enterprise Information Insights, Inc.
CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you will be able to:
- Know how complexity and uncertainty affect the project landscape
- Incorporate requirements, flexibility, adaptability, change, risk, team cohesiveness, communications, client involvement, specifications, and business value into how you will choose and use a project management life cycle (PMLC) model
- Use the Requirements Breakdown Structure (RBS) as the key ingredient of the best-fit decision model
You have now completed the foundation of what I will call the traditional project management process. It was once the only way projects were managed. Then along came complexity, uncertainty, and a market that demanded speed and agility. The agile age was born with the publication of the Agile Manifesto in 1991, and we have since entered the twenty-first century with a huge collection of agile project management approaches. Most of them were for software development projects and little else. In the remaining chapters of Part II I will organize all of these approaches into the landscape defined in Chapter 2 and discuss when to use them, their strengths and weaknesses, and finally how to adapt them to the variety of project management challenges that you will encounter. The material from Part I will be adapted to these unique and challenging high-risk situations. It is a project world filled with complexity and uncertainty, as described in this chapter.