The Complex Project Toolkit: Using design thinking to transform the delivery of your hardest projects

by Kieran Duck

The essential guide for project managers and leaders.Project managers are often responsible for big teams and millions (sometimes billions) of dollars to deliver successful outcomes on time and within budget. But the reality is, most complex projects don't live up to their promise - they often fail, under-deliver or get delivered but burn out everyone in the process. Author and experienced project manager, Kieran Duck, argues that this is because the normal approach to project management doesn't work when projects are complex. The traditional emphasis on certainty and predictability comes from an industrial era where the focus was on controlling resources and effort. These days projects are unpredictable, they are emergent and performance relies on the opinions of key stakeholders and team members.The Complex Project Toolkit provides a way through this. Based on the concepts of design thinking, this comprehensive toolkit adds to existing project management approaches with new mindsets, practices and skills that will lift the performance of your most ambitious projects and improve the experience for everyone involved.

242 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Sarah Cupitt]

WIP - excerpt of the full book - TBA ask Kieran for a full copy later

1st chapter notes/other thoughts:
- instead of linking the full book to purchase in book have it on the website too (ebook doesn't work)
- dedication was super sweet
- essentially you can't solve creative problems with analytical thinking
- we need to revisit our need for certainty and predictability
- if calculating the probability of a project’s success makes no allowance for the level of connection within the team, which clearly impacts performance, what else is missing from the standard toolkit?
- It wasn’t that they were no good at project management. They had a lot to offer and brought great processes for normal operations, but they weren’t seeing and addressing the heart of the problem when it came to complexity.
- At the heart of this dilemma is the fact that complex projects are fundamentally creative and emergent endeavours
- We may love the illusion of predictability and control that comes from detailed plans and coloured status reports, but when the project has lots of unknowns, these artefacts provide false hope and draw attention to the wrong things, reducing the chance of success.
- Traditional project management grew up in a different time. It has an industrial heritage, focused on coordinating a large number of resources to deliver an outcome with certainty
- We need an enhanced approach to managing complex projects – one that draws from those who operate in ambiguity and emergence every day. The best source of this is the minds of designers.
- At the heart of the Complex Project Toolkit are new practices. T hese are not ‘paint-by-number’ prescriptive processes to be blindly applied.
- The skill-set includes conversation, sense-making and adaption.
- T his book is for anyone who wants to make sense of project complexity and understand how to lead from a different place, shift the way teams operate, and raise the level of performance and ownership in complex projects.