Collaborative mechanism of project management based on complex system theory

Jiale Tian

School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Wuhan University of Technology, Hubei, 430070, China

Although it is arguable that humans have been studying complex systems for thousands of years, the modern scientific study of complex systems is relatively young in comparison to conventional fields of science with simple system assumptions, such as physics and chemistry. The history of the scientific study of these systems follows several different research trends. The project management community is actively demonstrating substantial interest in the development of viable methods to assess and improve project management maturity. There is little empirical evidence on the benefits of deploying a project management office (PMO) and/or conducting project reviews. The increasing complexity of exploratory activities in pharmaceutical innovation makes less likely that a project can stand alone. Project managers not only resort to in-house innovation but also external sources to propel a central project. This paper introduces the notion of a quality function for individual tasks and uses the functional form of the bivariate normal, to model quality at the task level. Using real data from two case studies, a translation agency and a software development company, the quality function is specified and incorporated into a mathematical programming model that allows quality to be explicitly considered in project planning and scheduling. An alternative model formulation leads to the creation of quality level curves that enable managers to evaluate the nonlinear tradeoffs between quality, time, and cost for each of the example projects. The results of these analyses lead to specific decisions about the planned values for these three fundamental dimensions at the task level and provide insights for project planning and scheduling that can be gained through improved understanding of the choices and tradeoffs.