مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The globalisation and rapid growth of industry has increased the number of complex projects across many sectors, including defense, infrastructure, and aerospace. The challenges associated with these projects are substantial. Indeed, almost every complex project is seemingly a “first of its kind” (Sauser et al., 2009), intended to deliver new capacities and/or complex infrastructures. These projects tend to be characterised by large budgets and issues associated with complex systems, such as nonlinearity, irregularity, and uncertainty. Moreover, such complex projects typically attract strong public attention and political interest as a result of substantial social, environmental, national, and even international implications being associated with the success and failure of such enterprises (Whitty and Maylor, 2009).

The performance of these large, complex projects is often disappointing. Many complex projects experience substantial cost overruns and delays in completion, and fail to deliver their objectives (Chang et al., 2013; Eden et al., 2005; Williams and Samset, 2010). For example, the FIFA World Cup 2014 project budget increased from the originally estimated €۱ billion to €۱۱ billion. Such failures in complex projects are not unique to sport events. The construction of Denver International Airport exceeded the original budget by 200% and was delivered 16 months over schedule (Flyvbjerg, 2005). Clearly, any research that seeks to improve the record of accomplishment in complex projects merits attention.

Researchers including Dvir et al. (2006) and Sauser et al. (2009) have found that challenges in complex projects are primarily associated with managerial, rather than technical issues.