“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Albert Einstein

 “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

― Albert Einstein

Understanding a project is absolutely critical to developing and executing an appropriate project plan. Project Managers spend significant time in defining client’s expectations, defining deliverables for the project and developing the data that we need to be able to develop a project charter in a project scope. We have developed tools and processes for gathering this information in articulating the information in different documents that become the foundation for developing a project plan. From these tools we gather a great deal of knowledge.

Sometimes knowledge is not enough. Developing an understanding of our project requires more than just gathering the data and collating the data into meaningful documents. Understanding requires seeing the interplay between the different components of our project and developing an understanding of how these different aspects come together to form a picture of a project. To understand our projects we need to think about the about the interplay between the different parts of the project, to process our knowledge of the project and develop a holistic view of our project.

The more complex[1] our project, the more difficult the task of understanding and developing this larger or more holistic view. The more complex our project, the greater the difficulty in developing a good understanding of our project. PMI has recently developed a tool for better understand the complexity of our project. In March of this year, PMI published Navigating Complexity: A Practice Guide online, hard copy is now available. Worth taking a look at.

Russ

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[1]   Complexity can be understood as the number of parts and their degree of differentiation

                                                                Dan McShea,

                             Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complexity