Understanding Complexity: The Organizational Dimension
Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.
In Part 1 of this three-part series, I applied a real-life war story to the environmental dimension in PMI’s Pulse of the Profession® 2026 – Driving Success in Complex Projects. In summary, the report stratifies complexity into three dimensions:
- The Environmental Dimension
- The Organizational Dimension
- The Human Dimension
In this installment, I will focus on the second dimension. Organizational complexity is the internal friction: unclear decision-making authority, siloed teams, competing priorities and misaligned objectives. Organizational complexity creates coordination challenges across teams, vendors and governance structures.
The real-life war story I began in Part 1 focused on environmental factors that drove the morphing of Initiative 1 (In1) into Initiative 2 (In2) after Conset acquired Oldco. I’ll continue with this example and apply the organizational dimension.
As Conset’s acquisition commenced, there were a whole host of Oldco organizations that were introduced into In2. Oldco’s organization structure didn’t necessarily map cleanly to Conset, so finding similar organizations between the two companies was at times difficult.
Add to that the differences in decision-making authority. There were numerous situations where peer managers between the two companies had differing levels of autonomy, slowing down …
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