Holistic Methods in Project Management

Authors: Williams Terry

Management Science Working Paper No. 16 (1995)

Abstract

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This paper looks at a major trend in the development of common tools and techniques in project management. The nature of major manufacturing (and software) projects is changing [1]: as products become more complex, development projects have become more complex, because cross-impacts both within products and within projects are becoming greater and there are stronger relationships between activities; furthermore, time-constraints on projects are becoming tighter, and time-based liquidated damages heavier, exacerbating the effect of increasing intra-project complexity (e.g. perturbations such as client changes or additions to workscope, when there are cross-effects cause delays which exacerbate concurrency which increases the cross-effects). it has become clear in recent times that traditional decomposition techniques are inadequate on their own for analysing and managing modern complex, integrated projects, particularly when those projects are subject to uncertainty and perturbations. This leads to the general conclusion that holistic methods need to be used. Different elements of work on such methods has been published; this paper seeks to bring the ideas together into an overall discussion, and to look at the implications, based on the author's consulting experience of modelling a number of recent projects.