Maylor, Harvey; Vidgen, Richard; Carver, Stephen: Managerial complexity in project-based operations – A grounded model and its implications for practice; in: Journal of Project Management, Vol. 39 (2008), No. S1, pp. S15-S26.
DOI: 10.1002/pmj.20057
Maylor et al. investigate the question – What makes a project complex? More specifically this question asks for managerial complexity of projects, which is neither technical nor environmental complexity which has been looked at in depth in research surrounding the whole areas of function point estimation.
The literature review finds several previous approaches to measure complexity
- Number of physical elements and interdependencies (Baccarini, 1996)
- Structural uncertainty (number of project elements), uncertainty of goals and objectives (Williams, 1999)
- Static dimension – assembly-system-array (Shenhar, 2001)
- Organisational complexity, technical novelty, scale complexity (Maylor, 2003)
- Observer-dependent, time-dependent, problem-dependent projects (Jaafari, 2003)
- Organisational x technological complexity (Xia & Lee, 2004)
- Communication and power relationships, amibguity, change (Cicmil & Marshall, 2005)
The authors then propose the MODeST model with the dimensions of mission, organisation, delivery, stakeholder, and team. In this qualitative focus group based research, the authors break down the dimesions into
Mission
– Objectives
– Scale
– Uncertainty
– Constraints
Organisation
– Time & Space
– Organisational setting
Delivery
– Process
– Resources
Stakeholder
– Stakeholder attributes
– Inter-stakeholder relationships
Team
– Project staff
– Project manager
– Group
This Complexity Measurements Table shows their full set of questions with the questions stricken out that were not mentioned sufficiently in the focus group discussions.