This research focuses on project complexity with the aim to better understand it and to highlight the factors that affect/contribute to it. In addition, this research also highlights key project management practices and project critical success factors considered important to manage project complexity/complex projects. The two main motivating factors behind this research were, the lack of understanding of complex projects and the lack of relevance of project management theory to practice, which have been highlighted by many researchers. Since projects in different sectors are increasingly being characterised as complex, this entails a better project management knowledge base focusing on the dynamic, social and complex contexts of projects, so that the interrelationships, interdependencies and uncertainties between different project interfaces can be understood and managed properly. In order to understand this 'project actuality', it was necessary to obtain the views from practitioners working in these project settings and managing project dynamics and intricacies. To establish this pragmatic view, a series of interviews and questionnaire surveys was carried out and all efforts were made to select the participants working on complex projects with complex products falling under the Complex Product Systems (CoPS) category which was the case in the 2nd phase interviews and questionnaire, whereas in the 1st phase practitioners with industrial experience and also involved and/or in the process of getting academic qualification in project management were preferred. The first phase helped in establishing the theoretical and pragmatic perspective and the 2nd phase in refining and validating the findings. The questions were inline with the research focus mentioned earlier.The main findings of the research show that the perception of project complexity and its contributing factors were very much influenced by the project context, i.e. from organization level to work discipline level. No difference in the practitioners' perception of project complexity and its contributing factors was observed among the practitioners based in a similar organization and project setting. Novelty was found to be one of the key project complexity characteristics related to three project elements-people, product and process. In terms of key project management practices and skills considered important in managing project complexity, soft skills were reported useful by majority of the participants. The key processes found useful were either the ones which focused on people or others which helped to manage changes/deviations in projects. Influence and relationship, delegation, flexibility and trust were the main project critical success factors which emerged out of this research for complex projects.

The main drivers for this research are the complexities associated with the project management and an organization's project management style in dealing with these complexities. This research aims to demonstrate that alignment between project complexity and project management style increases project performance and decreases project issues, and also, with increased project issues, project performance deteriorates. In order to test these claims, this research developed measures for assessing project complexity, project management styles and project issues by employing a survey of project management professionals. The measure for project complexity is based on a taxonomy with four categories: organizational complexity, product complexity, methods (process) complexity and goal complexity. Project management style is defined as the management paradigm that guides the managers of an organization in perceiving and dealing with management problems. The measure for project nagement style is based on the plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle and the Newtonian and complexity paradigms. Also the measures for project issues are developed after an extensive content analysis on the literature on project issues, risks and success factors. A self-administered survey instrument (paper-based and on-line) with 40 questions (seven point Likert scale) was utilized. The respondents were the project management professionals from different industries in the Central Florida region. Each respondent was asked to answer questions for two different kinds of projects: a successful project and a challenged project. Based on the data collected by the survey instrument, the results of confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses provide strong evidence that the final measures for project technology complexity, project management styles, project issues and project performance have adequate validity and reliability. Results of the hypothesis tests demonstrate that increased alignment of project complexity and project management style leads to increased project performance and decreased project issues, and also increased project issues leads to project decreased performance. From the perspective of project management, the results of this study have illustrated the importance of aligning a project's complexity and management style. These results suggest that project or program managers can improve the performance of their projects by any attempt to increase the alignment between project complexity and project management style. Project management professionals and theoreticians can use the methodologies provided in this dissertation to assess project complexity, project management style and alignment.

Bakgrund:  Digitaliseringens framfart påverkar i princip allting i dagens samhälle. Detta har lett till att företagens IT-landskap blir alltmer komplexa. För att hantera detta introduceras många olika IT-projekt inom organisationer. Dessa IT-projekt har dock en historia av att misslyckas och det finns därför mängder av rekommenderade implementationsprocesser samt litteratur som beskriver hur man bör hantera projektkomplexitet. Däremot saknas forskning som utreder om verksamhetsarkitektur bidrar till projektkomplexiteten samt empiriska undersökningar angående hur detta hanteras.  Syfte: Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur verksamhetsarkitektur kan påverka projektkomplexitet och i sin tur implementation av nya affärssystem. Vidare ämnar studien skapa förståelse för hur projektkomplexitet hanteras i implementeringsprocesser.   Metod: Denna studie är en kvalitativ fallstudie, där vi undersökt ett företag inom miljö- och återvinningsbranschen. Empirin har samlats in genom fem semistrukturerade intervjuer där urvalet varit målstyrt. Slutsats: Denna studie visar att verksamhetsarkitekturen påverkar de faktorer som ingår i projektkomplexitet. I detta fall har det även påverkat implementeringen av nya affärssystem negativt. Vidare visar studien en bristfällig hantering av projektkomplexitet då fallföretaget inte haft något tillvägagångssätt för att vare sig förebygga komplexitet eller hantera det utmaningar som uppstått. / Background: The advance of digitalisation affects almost everything in today's society. This has led to an increasingly complex IT landscape for businesses. To cope with this, many different IT projects are being introduced within organisations. However, these IT projects have a history of failing and there is therefore a wealth of recommended implementation processes and literature describing how to deal with project complexity. However, there is a lack of research investigating whether enterprise architecture contributes to project complexity and empirical studies on how this is managed. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how architecture has affected project complexity and in turn the implementation of new business systems. Furthermore, the study intends to provide an understanding of how project complexity is handled within implementation processes.   Completion: This study is a qualitative case study, in which we investigated a company in the environmental and recycling industry. The empirical data have been collected through five semi-structured interviews where the sample was purposive.  Conclusion: This study shows that the enterprise architecture influences the factors of project complexity. In this case, it has also negatively affected the implementation of new enterprise systems. Furthermore, the study shows a poor management of project complexity as the case company had no approach to either prevent complexity or manage the challenges that arose.

<p>There is a common belief amongst those who are involved in projects that as project complexity increases the difficulty to manage a project increases and thus the probability to succeed in project completion considerably decreases. Perception of complexity in a project usually refers to common criteria from traditional project management thinking such as the scale of the project; cost; duration; and the degree of risk to its owner. However, whether a project is perceived to be complex or not may not be purely a product of the size of the project. It may also be derived from the person’s experience in projects. The aim of this study is to identify attributes of perception of project complexity and observe whether experience is also a determining factor in perceiving a project as complex. The research is based on the assumption that a complex project may exhibit behaviour similar to complex adaptive system. This study proposes a theoretical framework based on projects understood as complex adaptive systems. A project experience matrix is developed which will be useful to help link degree and type of experience to perceptions of project complexity.</p><p>This study employs a comparative study between two cases to explore and compare the perception of complexity in each case. Qualitative and quantitative data were obtained through semi-structured interview and questionnaires, then analysed accordingly. The outcomes of this research attempted to find answers to the following questions: How do project managers and team members perceive a project as complex (project complexity)?” In answering this question we explored how project managers and team members perceived project complexity. The major question above was elaborated by some minor specific questions. These are: Which attributes of complex adaptive systems are attributed by project managers and team members to project complexity? Is project experience a determining factor to the perception of project complexity? Based on our sample we found no significant differences between attributes of complex adaptive systems and perception of project complexity; no significant association between depth and context of experience and perception of project complexity. We also found no significant differences between the Chinese and Indonesian samples.</p>

There is a common belief amongst those who are involved in projects that as project complexity increases the difficulty to manage a project increases and thus the probability to succeed in project completion considerably decreases. Perception of complexity in a project usually refers to common criteria from traditional project management thinking such as the scale of the project; cost; duration; and the degree of risk to its owner. However, whether a project is perceived to be complex or not may not be purely a product of the size of the project. It may also be derived from the person’s experience in projects. The aim of this study is to identify attributes of perception of project complexity and observe whether experience is also a determining factor in perceiving a project as complex. The research is based on the assumption that a complex project may exhibit behaviour similar to complex adaptive system. This study proposes a theoretical framework based on projects understood as complex adaptive systems. A project experience matrix is developed which will be useful to help link degree and type of experience to perceptions of project complexity. This study employs a comparative study between two cases to explore and compare the perception of complexity in each case. Qualitative and quantitative data were obtained through semi-structured interview and questionnaires, then analysed accordingly. The outcomes of this research attempted to find answers to the following questions: How do project managers and team members perceive a project as complex (project complexity)?” In answering this question we explored how project managers and team members perceived project complexity. The major question above was elaborated by some minor specific questions. These are: Which attributes of complex adaptive systems are attributed by project managers and team members to project complexity? Is project experience a determining factor to the perception of project complexity? Based on our sample we found no significant differences between attributes of complex adaptive systems and perception of project complexity; no significant association between depth and context of experience and perception of project complexity. We also found no significant differences between the Chinese and Indonesian samples.

In the context of a growing social complexification, projects have evolved in the pastdecades from simple endeavours to complex and uncertain undertakings. Consequently,project complexity has emerged as an important research direction, and recently severalproject complexity frameworks have been suggested. However, little research has beendone in this area and there has been no study on the relationship of project complexity,in its holistic sense, and the risk of delay. Therefore, the study investigates the intricaterelationship between project complexity and project delay. The research is conducted inthe context of Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP) implementation projects,which are inherently complex and often record delays. The study has a qualitative nature and adopts an inductive approach. Nine ERPimplementationprojects have been studied in order to answer the research question.Several sources of evidence (semi-structured interviews and questionnaires) have beenutilized to ensure the credibility of the research findings through triangulation. The study contributes to the research field by verifying and augmenting the existingframeworks on reasons for project delay, complexity categories and their interplay. Itwas identified that complexity in a holistic sense represents a necessary condition forproject delay. Moreover, the study showed that although ERP projects are oftenconsidered to be technically complex, their complexity stems mainly from ‘subjective’(or perceived) and ‘uncertainty’ complexity dimensions. Finally, the conceptual modelof Eden et al. (2005) was modified to reflect the findings of the study.

<p>Osnovni cilj istraživanja predstavlja ispitivanje faktora<br />kompleksnosti koji utiču na performanse međunarodnih razvojnih<br />projekata. Savremeni izazovi u upravljanju međunarodnim razvojnim<br />projektima doveli su do povećane kompleksnosti ove vrste projekata,<br />što je u poslednjih nekoliko godina podstaklo istraživače da<br />publikuju veliki broj radova na ovu temu. Dobijeni model<br />kompleksnosti razvijen je kombinovanjem rezultata Delfi<br />istraživanja sa rezultatima kvantitativnog istraživanja. Model<br />kompleksnosti može biti primenjen od strane praktičara i akademika<br />za procenu nivoa kompleksnosti međunarodnih razvojnih projekata.</p> / <p>The main goal of the research is to examine complexity factors that influence<br />International Development projects. Contemporary challenges in ID projects<br />have led to their growth in their complexity, which in recent years has driven<br />researches in recent years to publish numerous papers that deal with this<br />topic, demonstrating its importance in current project management research.<br />The research in the dissertation was done by conducting mixed research<br />method &ndash; by comparing Delphi methodology in the qualitative part, with<br />quantitative research. The model represents a novel theoretical lens for<br />assessing complexity in ID projects by both academics and practitioners.</p>

<p>In a matrix organization, the process of selecting project team members is a collaboration between the functions and the projects. A project’s success or failure does often depend on that collaboration. This thesis work examines the present situation at Saab Gripen Customer Support. The process is examined from four different perspectives: the roles of the functional and the project manager, competence development, behavioural science team roles and the complexity of the projects. The result shows that the roles of the project manager and the functional manager in their collaboration are not properly defined. The communication between the project manager and the functional manager is insufficient. The competence development during the projects is not fully taken advantage of. There is a need to use behavioural science. Recommendations on how the situation can be improved are given. A model is proposed to give guidance in the process of selecting project team members.</p>

In a matrix organization, the process of selecting project team members is a collaboration between the functions and the projects. A project’s success or failure does often depend on that collaboration. This thesis work examines the present situation at Saab Gripen Customer Support. The process is examined from four different perspectives: the roles of the functional and the project manager, competence development, behavioural science team roles and the complexity of the projects. The result shows that the roles of the project manager and the functional manager in their collaboration are not properly defined. The communication between the project manager and the functional manager is insufficient. The competence development during the projects is not fully taken advantage of. There is a need to use behavioural science. Recommendations on how the situation can be improved are given. A model is proposed to give guidance in the process of selecting project team members.

The aim of this research is to test the effect of different project complexities and project management competence of project managers in public sector mega engineering projects of Pakistan and their effect on project performance. This research study is applied in Pakistan. Complexities in a project are inevitable. These cannot be controlled or eliminated but one can have their better understanding to counter them resulting in better project performance.  Quantitative research techniques have been applied for this particular research study. A total of 100 questionnaires were handed out among respondents, of which 82 survey questionnaires were useful for further analysis. Hypotheses have been developed to test the effect of variables of  project management competence on project performance and subsequently the effect of Technical, Organizational and environmental complexity on project performance.   Results show that project management competence have a positive effect on project performance, like leadership, management skills, communication, ethics, honesty have a strong impact on project performance. Secondly, Technical and organizational complexity have a negative effect on project performance whereas hypothesis of environmental complexity has not supported the project performance.  Further, a number of complexities were high ranked. For instance, goals, tasks and market conditions were ranked very high with respect to their impact on project performance.  This study contributes theoretically in the field of project management and on practical level study will not only help the Practioners in the field of PM, but also helpful for project managers of mega engineering projects. On societal level this study may help the Government intuitions in formulating rules and regulations such as PM certifications that can improve the project performance.