Technology Complexity in Projects: Does Classical Project Management Work?

Abstract

After World War II, project management emerged as a management discipline to manage large high technology projects, like nuclear missiles and space program. But recent evidence suggests that technology projects either fail to reach their goals or fail completely. Project management style is the management paradigm that guides the managers of an organization in perceiving and dealing with the management problems. Like other human intellectual processes, project management styles are influenced by the scientific paradigms. Classical project management is based on the scientific management theories which are based on the mechanistic Newtonian paradigm, where universe is assumed to be deterministic. But during the last decades of the 20th century the complexity paradigm based on the chaos and complex adaptive system theories emerged as a contender paradigm. This paper aims to develop measures for assessing project technology complexity and project management styles by employing a survey of project management professionals. The results of confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses provide strong evidence that the final measures for project technology complexity and project management styles have adequate validity and reliability. Finally, both theoretical and practical contributions of this research are discussed.