ABSTRACT
Many theorists and practitioners now agree that complex projects exist in a different universe from that on which much project management theory has been based. This is not to say that existing project methodologies should be discarded. Rather it points to the fact that project managers must manage from a pluralistic perspective, drawing upon a much wider range of models to help them cope with the various sources of complexity. In this book we have attempted to apply ideas from Complexity Theory to project management with the aim of throwing some light on why complex projects are so difficult to manage. We have done so by suggesting that the source of complexity might be a useful way of thinking about the complex issues to be managed in many projects. To this end we have defined four types of project complexity, building upon the work of many others. However, we recognise that any process of categorisation is fraught with problems through omissions in the process of classification or because many projects will fall between the categories or, more likely, exhibit any number of combinations of the categories we have defined. Nevertheless categories are useful to help us think about the different management challenges that might be associated with each source of complexity.
