Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Categories: complex projects
PMI has produced a whole practice guide on managing complex projects. Navigating Project Complexity: A Practice Guide, takes you through how to assess your project in the complexity stakes and then put together a robust project management approach to handle the areas that might be difficult.
But it all starts with building a working environment that fosters the culture for complex projects to succeed.
The conditions for success
PMI identifies six conditions that, if present, will increase your chance of success on a complex project. Let’s take a look and see what they are and how you can recreate them in your own environment.
1. Leadership
It won’t come as much of a surprise to know that strong leadership is going to really help you develop and deliver a complex project. A good leader should:
- Be an active executive sponsor
- Demonstrate commitment to the project
- Empower the project team to deliver
- Notice the early warning signs of failure and work with the team to put in place recovery plans
- Champion the project and highlight successes at senior management levels in the organisation.
Read more about the four traits of great leaders here (hint: it’s an attitude).
When working on a complex project, one of the key things a leader can do is to tell everyone that it’s an important initiative. Even if you can’t plan it to a fine degree of detail, at least set the leadership agenda so everyone is aware that it’s a huge strategic priority.
2. Portfolio management
Get portfolio management.
OK, that’s harder to do than it is to write. Portfolio management gives you the tools to navigate through complex project situations because:
- It helps leaders understand project priorities
- It helps share best practice between projects
- It monitors the overall health of corporate initiatives
- Managers understand the need to implement tools to support all strategic and tactical initiatives, which are looked at in a holistic way.
3. Collaboration
A culture that fosters collaboration is going to be able to successful negotiate the complexities of projects far more successfully than one which prefers knowledge silos.
Encourage communication between team members and also up to the project sponsor and program or portfolio team. Use change management practices to ensure that new ways of working are properly embedded. As a project manager, work with an open door policy both within your own team and also supporting cross-functional working across diverse teams as well.
4. Performance measurements
You can cope better with complex situations if the structure is in place to measure them. Performance metrics give you the chance to understand the health of the project at a given point in time. Then you can act to address that if necessary.
Set up your performance measurements (get some tips from Gartner’s experts for setting up project metrics here) before your projects go too far. Typical things that you would want to measure are:
- Schedule performance
- Financial performance
- Adherence to scope
- Quality
Complex projects would also benefit from using Earned Value Management too. Actually, the list of things to measure for complex projects is quite similar to what I’d expect more straightforward projects to be measuring.
5. Align organisational structures
Typically you’ll be managing projects within a projectised, matrix or functional organisation. The structure you use depends on the culture of the business, geography and lots of other things. However, for complex projects you may find a different-to-normal set up works better.
A flatter structure may work well with a distributed project team. There may be more delegated authority than normal. In my experience co-locating the team works well, as does arranging the resources under the line management control of a project manager so that managing the resources involved becomes easier.
In short, set up your complex project in any way you like that makes it easier to manage. The point is to take complexity out with your management structure, not make the situation worse!
6.Skills gap
Carry out an assessement of the skills available in the team toensure that you have the right resources available to you. Ideally, you should do this before the project really begins, otherwise you could find yourself committed to delivering project tasks and no one capable of doing them.
It’s fine to bring in external help if you feel that would bolster your internal team, but remember that long-term you should aim to be supporting this change initiative yourselves, so build in knowledge transfer from external resources.
By focusing on these six areas, you can create an environment for your project where even complex initiatives are more likely to succeed.
Enjoyed this? Follow Elizabeth on Facebook here.
Posted on: February 03, 2015 09:40 AM |
Permalink