Complexity Management Strategies Research Articles

Development of complexity management strategies for construction projects

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to ascertain and list the most effective management strategies in efficiently handling the project complexities to enhance the performance of the project.Design/methodology/approachTo fulfill the aim of this study, a comprehensive literature review was conducted, and the qualitative Delphi technique in two rounds was applied. Participants of the Delphi technique consisted of 12 subject matter experts (SMEs) with cumulative experience of 250 years in working in construction projects. In the first round of the Delphi technique, SMEs were asked to provide complexity management strategies to address the complexities due to 37 complexity indicators (CIs) under 11 complexity categories. In the second round of the Delphi technique, SMEs identified the top three management strategies for each of the 37 CIs.FindingsThis study collected the outcome of the two-round Delphi technique and based on the output developed the list of strategies to manage complexities related to each indicator. For example, establishing a well-informed governance team, assigning a Project Manager (PM) when the number of projects is more than one in an organization, and assigning a PM efficient enough to communicate with higher authority effectively will help in managing complexity that arises due to faulty assessment of the influence of a project on the organization’s overall success.Originality/valueThis study will help practitioners in effectively managing the project complexities, and thus will reduce the monetary loss associated with project complexities.

Management of complexity in the care ecosystem

Purpose Managing complexity within care ecosystems is an increasing universal challenge. In health, this is emphasised by recent calls for greater care integration to achieve service improvement as levels of comorbidity and frailty grow within populations. This research takes a service-dominant logic (SDL) stance in examining the sources, types and nature of complexity within a care ecosystem in the UK. Design/methodology/approach This illustrative case research focuses on a community care ecosystem. A multi-method approach is used combining semi-structured interviews, descriptive statistics and secondary data. The results were independently assessed and validated by participants through a second interview phase. Findings The findings from this research provide empirical support for the six complexities discussed in the supply chain literature. Identifying these complexities proffers the opportunity of applying manufacturing-derived complexity management strategies in care ecosystems. The conceptual model for institutional complexity, derived from the illustrative case study, showed that care professionals face additional complexity challenges in operating care ecosystems. Practical implications The management of complexity in care ecosystems requires professionals to be considerate of institutional arrangements when addressing the consequences of increasing levels of complexity. This necessitates the development of a balanced approach between reducing complexity while absorbing institutional arrangements which minimise risk. Originality/value Drawing on the supply chain complexity literature, the paper has developed a framework which guides care professionals facing increasing levels of complexity within the context of their institutional arrangements. As such, this research furthers our understanding of supply chain complexity effects in care ecosystems and provides a platform for future research.

Devices and strategies: An analysis of managing complexity in energy retrofit projects

Energy retrofits in households are an important means of reducing energy consumption and mitigating climate change. However, energy retrofit rates have generally been lower than expected. As a key reason behind non-adoption, the complexity of energy retrofits can be challenging for adopters to handle. In this article, we study how suppliers and retrofit adopters seek to manage the complexity of an energy retrofit purchase. Using interview and mystery shopping data, the article analyses how the complexity is managed through a variety of complexity management devices (CMD) and complexity management strategies (CMS). We identify four complexity management devices, concretizations that help deal with energy retrofit complexity: characterisations, projections, comparisons and references. In addition, we identify four complexity management strategies for managing complexity: pre-exposure, choice simplification, outsourcing and championing. The contribution of the study is in highlighting the role of complexity management in energy retrofits and how CMDs and CMSs are involved in structuring energy retrofit offerings, business models and energy information. This, in turn, provides impetus for developing measures to ease the complexity of adoption.

Managing schools as complex adaptive systems: A strategic perspective

This conceptual study examines the analogies between schools and complex adaptive systems and identifies strategies used to manage schools as complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems approach, introduced by the complexity theory, requires school administrators to develop new skills and strategies to realize their agendas in an ever-changing and complexifying environment without any expectations of stability and predictability. The results indicated that in this period administrators need to have basic skills such as (a) diagnosing patterns emerging from complexity, (b) manipulating the environment by anticipating potential patterns organizations may evolve into, (c) choosing organizational structures compatible with an ever-changing and complexifying environment and (d) promoting innovation to create and manage organizational changes. Although these skills enable administrators to reduce complexity into a manageable form to some extent, stakeholders’ having a common perspective regarding their schools and environments, and executing their activities in accordance with a shared vision are required to turn these skills into complexity management strategies.

Our Cyber-Systemic Future

How can systems and cybernetics address the issues arising from an increasingly complex world, that often is beyond our traditional response capabilities? The author argues that to address such complexity we require imaginative propositions and innovative behaviours to see and address the inherently systemic nature of our world, which too often is fragmented by policies driven by non-systemic models. Socially, we live in a world experiencing systemic deficit; our policy responses are often fragmented, but even if they are not, socially designed responses fail to recognise environmental constraints and produce innovative allocations of requisite resources to make them happen. The author argues that conversational spaces, such as those offered by the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics [WOSC], and other cybersystemic associations, should help dealing with fragmentation and resources allocation; he sees these conversations as necessary contributions to redress our systemic deficit. Systemic thinking should help in visualising social situations as wholes, thus reducing the chances of dysfunctional fragmentation and cybernetics should help us understanding processes of dynamic stability in the interactions among and between people, institutions, and organizations. Systemic thinking should give us methodological tools; cybernetics should give us communication tools to manage the complexity of situations from the local to the global. The paper discusses complexity management strategies, emphasising the need to deal operationally with this complexity rather than cognitively; operational complexity is orders of magnitude larger than cognitive complexity. The paper ends up with an illustration of these complexity management strategies in higher education.

An Empirical Study into Identifying Project Complexity Management Strategies

Complexity is a term that is used throughout the construction industry. When complexity is poorly understood and managed, project failure become the norm. However, there are limited number of studies which investigated best practices which could overcome the undesired outcomes of complexity challenges. This research focused on identifying strategies to manage complexity in order to increase the likelihood of project success. Initially, this paper reviewed different project complexity definitions and suggested a single definition. Furthermore, the differences between complexity, uncertainty and risk were explained. Moreover, complexity management strategies were collected and enhanced. For this purpose, two rounds of qualitative Delphi method were applied to identify and improve complexity management best practices. In the first round, Subject Matter Experts were asked to individually provide top complexity management strategies. In the second round of this study, the twelve experts were participated in a complexity management workshop to advance the identified strategies.

Best Practice Sharing for Complexity Management in Supply Chains of the Semiconductor Industry

Global supply chain becomes complex because of a fast increasing number of dynamic interactions which need to be handled. The semiconductor industry is characterized by long product life cycles, highly differentiated products, and non-linearity in the manufacturing process; furthermore the semiconductor companies also face a volatile market due to the upstream position in the supply chain of consumer electronics which makes the demand from end-customers hard to forecast.The purpose of this paper is to analyze the key drivers of supply chain complexity in the semiconductor industry from practical view and to find the common ground between them. Several prevalent problems address different aspects of supply chain complexity occurred in daily operations were collected from an international semiconductor company, and discussed at an internal workshop with around forty participants from supply chain, IT or other business units. For each case the main drivers of complexity were mapped from reality to a conceptual model. Possible solutions to manage complexity were brainstormed and structured finally. By gathering all discussion results, these findings can be summarized:1)Different complexity problems might have the same solution2)Human roles, common understanding and communication become very important in complexity management3)Trends for complexity management strategies: for current complexity, manage the value-added complexity which is necessary and reduce non-value added complexity; avoid future non-value added complexityThese empirical results also provide evidence for our hypothesis, that complexity can be viewed from these aspects: process, role, object (state) and analyzed by their individual attributes which have influences on the system. This PROS approach defines a conceptual model to describe a complex system from the theoretical perspective. People get further indications that PROS model is a useful tool to analyze complexity and it can help to separate value added from non-value added complexity.

Project Complexity Indicators and Management Strategies – A Delphi Study

Construction industry experts believe that project performance frequently suffers due to construction complexity issues. However, there are limited studies focusing on construction project complexity definition, characteristics and indicators. In this paper, a qualitative Delphi method was applied to identify and validate significant complexity indicators. To fulfill this purpose, ten Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) were invited to participate in a complexity assessment and management workshop. Through two rounds of the Delphi study, the top 30 complexity indicators were identified and ranked. It was concluded that “peak number of participants on the Project Management Team during engineering/design phase of the project”, “magnitude of change orders impacting project execution”, and “frequency of the workarounds” are the top three complexity indicators respectively. Furthermore, the impact weight associated with each of the complexity indicators were calculated. In the second part of the workshop, the Delphi methodology was again utilized to capture complexity management strategies and practices.

Performance for viability: complexity and variety management

Purpose– It is natural for interacting organisational actors and environmental agents to experience complexity asymmetries. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the balancing of these complexities at a level of performance that not only maintains the organisation’s viability but also the health of its ecosystem.Design/methodology/approach– Ashby (1964) proposed variety, or the number of possible states of a situation, as a measure of complexity and the Law of Requisite Variety as an ontology and heuristic for complexity management strategies. Following these propositions Beer’s variety engineering (Beer, 1979) is a construct to design these strategies.Findings– This paper offers epistemological and methodological considerations to discuss the viability and performance of organisational systems.Research limitations/implications– Measuring organisational performance needs powerful methodological support. This paper offers to some extend this support but it needs further development.Practical implications– Performance is related to the concept of dynamic capabilities, which in recent times has had important practical implications.Originality/value– Though the concepts of this paper have a long history, their methodological articulation is original.

A Fuzzy Robust Optimization Model for Waste Allocation Planning Under Uncertainty.

In this study, a fuzzy robust optimization (FRO) model was developed for supporting municipal solid waste management under uncertainty. The Development Zone of the City of Dalian, China, was used as a study case for demonstration. Comparing with traditional fuzzy models, the FRO model made improvement by considering the minimization of the weighted summation among the expected objective values, the differences between two extreme possible objective values, and the penalty of the constraints violation as the objective function, instead of relying purely on the minimization of expected value. Such an improvement leads to enhanced system reliability and the model becomes especially useful when multiple types of uncertainties and complexities are involved in the management system. Through a case study, the applicability of the FRO model was successfully demonstrated. Solutions under three future planning scenarios were provided by the FRO model, including (1) priority on economic development, (2) priority on environmental protection, and (3) balanced consideration for both. The balanced scenario solution was recommended for decision makers, since it respected both system economy and reliability. The model proved valuable in providing a comprehensive profile about the studied system and helping decision makers gain an in-depth insight into system complexity and select cost-effective management strategies.

Governance and inclusive democracy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to offer a research agenda to improve on representative, participatory and deliberative forms of democracy. It argues for an inclusive democracy built upon a cybernetic understanding of governance and organization structure.Design/methodology/approachBased on complexity management strategies, the paper offers a conceptual construction of governance and democracy. The case of Colombia over the past 60 years is used to illustrate these strategies; it makes apparent that in spite of good intentions, the cybernetics of the country and its cities has faltered over this period, hindering its democracy. To learn how to overcome this weakness and support the evolution towards an inclusive democracy, the authors propose a research agenda aimed at studying the viability of cities.FindingsThe paper indicates that there is a broad field to apply management cybernetic tools in the political domain, as for example the classic archetypes that inhibit the emergence of effective structural recursion and people's local participation in global issues, restricting their social inclusion.Research limitations/implicationsIn many Colombian cities and towns people live in very difficult conditions and to survive they often fall into corruption, but others display apparent resiliency, solidarity, communitarian organization and so forth. Learning about good practices should help visualise strategies towards democratic inclusion and good governance.Social implicationsThe main question supporting the whole research could be expressed as, how is it possible to reduce power imbalances that inhibit and restrict the effective participation of its citizens? The corresponding answer will imply improving citizen's quality of life beginning with democratic structures to live in and to practice active citizenship.Originality/valueThe paper offers insights about inclusion and effective governance; it argues that “connecting” a local person's views and actions to global policies is feasible and that this is necessary for effective inclusion.

Entropy-Based Optimization of Decentralized Supply-Chain Networks

Supply-chain operations are intricate and complex due to exogenous and endogenous uncertainties. The prime weakness in a decentralized supply chain arises due to lack of consideration of the uncertainty generation and transmission between supply-chain entities. Ineffective internal strategies carry the uncertainties beyond the boundaries of the supply-chain entity and consequently affect predictability of supply-chain behavior, customer satisfaction, and cost. Previous attempts made to enhance the supply-chain performance by optimizing the replenishment strategy do not pay attention to the issue of increasing uncertainty and consequent operational complexity in the system. The storage and flow of uncertainty must therefore be controlled and managed effectively. The minimization of complexity in supply chains using Shannon’s entropy-based measures by tweaking supply-chain decision parameters (replenishment parameters) is a unique aspect of this work. As a result, the predictability of the supply chain is improved. Four complexity management strategies (S-I to S-IV) are proposed and analyzed to understand their benefits under diverse business scenarios. Our investigations demonstrate that the strategy which aims to minimize an additive measure of information and material flow complexity outperforms other complexity management strategies under all business scenarios.

The hidden cost of doing business

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to present the findings of a project to study the complexity management activities and strategies of 20 global companies.Design/methodology/approach – The article is based on a survey of 65 managers of 20 global companies. Interviews with senior management were combined with the study of public and company files.Findings – Global companies have a tremendous opportunity in making quantum leaps in complexity reduction. We have found that around 25 to 35 percent of costs is complexity‐driven. There are two successful approaches to managing business complexity costs: simplification and reconfiguration.Research limitations/implications – The study is embedded in qualitative research.Practical implications – Coping with complexity requires continuous efforts to identify and eliminate complications that add no value. Management has to analyze the company and its environment to flush out the hidden linkages between costs, activities, and the decisions that generated them.O...