Complex Project Management: Using Complexity and Volatility to Guide Hybrid Methodological Practices

Organisations must adapt to their changing business environment to remain profitable, competitive and able to meet their strategic goals, with projects often the instruments used to do so. A project is “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result” with project management (PM) “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements” (Project Management Institute, 2013), usually combined in specific PM methodologies. With organisational problems of increasing complexity and volatility, there is a growing recognition that better PM methodologies should be developed to deal with these characteristics (Theocharis et al., 2015), and that PM should be seen as a form of complex problem solving (Ahern, Leavy, and Byrne, 2014).