Systems Thinking for Project Management? Risky Not To

Abstract

Adopting system thinking concepts within the realm of project management may assist in avoiding or at least reducing the significant overruns being experienced by projects across the globe. This chapter examines this premise and considers this from three aspects. The first is actively incorporating the views of a range of project stakeholders. This inclusion not only ensures the capture of a wide array of risks but also enables ‘buy in’ and alignment of direction, thus attending to arguments that stakeholder management is a critical component of successful projects. In addition, the chapter considers how systems thinking can add significant value through attending to the capture of the interactive nature of risks and the dynamics of risk – the continuous changing of composition and salience over time.The chapter briefly notes the evolution of tools and techniques for assisting project managers in taking a systemic view focusing on one particular technique, causal mapping, to provide illustration. The chapter concludes with the view that not only is it important to capture i) a wide array of risks, ii) interactions between risks and iii) breadth of stakeholders but that each of these aspects impact one another adding a further systemic factor.