Kathleen Hass Associates Consulting

Kitty has written extensively about the challenges of managing complex projects.  In her white paper on the topic, she states:  “The twenty-first century, business processes have become more complex; i.e., more interconnected, interdependent, and interrelated than ever before.  In addition, businesses today are rejecting traditional management structures to create complex organizational communities comprised of alliances with strategic suppliers, networks of customers, and partnerships with key political groups, regulatory entities, and even competitors.  Through these alliances, organizations are addressing the pressures of unprecedented change, global competition, time-to-market compression, rapidly changing technologies, and yes, increasing complexity.  As a result, business systems are significantly more complex than in the past; therefore, the projects that implement new business systems are more complex.  Huge cost and schedule overruns have been commonplace in the past (New York Times, 11 July 2002).  To reap the rewards of significant, large-scale change initiatives designed to not only keep organizations in the game but make them a major player, we must find new ways to manage project complexity.”

There are many different ways projects can become both complicated and complex.  The business problem might be difficult to define.  The solution may be elusive and difficult to determine, describe, or grasp.  Business boundaries might be unclear.  Business process relationships are likely to be non-linear and contain multiple feedback loops.  Today’s complex business systems will change over time, and therefore need to be dynamic, adaptive, and flexible.  Some business systems are nested; i.e., the components of the system may themselves be complex.  There are a number of dimensions of project complexity, including: team size and composition, project duration, schedule, cost and scope flexibility, clarity of the problem and solution, stability of requirements, strategic importance, level of organizational change, inter-project dependencies, political sensitivity, and unproven technology.”

Kitty  has created a new model for managing complex projects, the Project Complexity Model  used to evaluate project size, complexity, and risk and determine the specific dimensions of complexity that are present on a project.  Kitty and her team work closely with very senior business analysts, project managers, business visionaries, and lead technologists to diagnose the complexity dimensions present on a project and determine strategies to manage them.