Engineering Project Management: Mastering Project Complexity

Underestimating project complexity is widely accepted as one of the major causes of project failure. Based on international benchmarking activities (Merrow, 2010), we know that an average of 40% of projects do not deliver what they promised. So how can you as an engineer with a technical background improve your project performance? In this program, you will learn the project management skills you need to successfully manage engineering projects. First you will focus on the early project phases, which are crucial to achieve project success. The areas covered include the project manager and the team, the project process and the project context. At the end of this part of the program you will have created your own project execution plan. But how will you deal with the inherent uncertainties linked to the length and scale of engineering and infrastructure projects and their constantly changing environments? As with most external factors, many of the causes and consequences of these uncertainties are difficult to avoid or control. Attempts to overcome these challenges by simply trying to reduce their causes is not enough. In the second part of the program you will learn our approach to mastering project complexity, focused on front-end development and teamwork. You will develop the skills you need to make timely actions in order to tackle complexities and improve your chances of project success. You will learn to identify what makes a project complex and how to perform a complexity assessment. You will analyze these elements in the context of your own project. Then, based on our complexity framework, you will identify the complexity footprint of your project and use it to adapt your management processes. This course has been designed by TU Delft’s international experts on Project Complexity, and is based on more than 60 years of practical experience as well as relevant research in the field. “We see projects still fail and there is a need to do things differently. That’s what this course is about: delivering the best practices for project execution based on our state-of-the-art research.” – Professor Hans Bakker.