Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Change vs. the Complexity/Uncertainty Domain

As complexity increases, so does the need to receive and process change requests. A plan-driven project management approach is not designed to effectively respond to change. Change upsets the order of things as some of the project plan is rendered obsolete and must be redone. Resource schedules are compromised and may have to be renegotiated at some cost. The more that change has to be dealt with, the more time is spent processing and evaluating those changes. That time is forever lost to the project. It should have been spent on value-added work. Instead it was spent processing change requests.

You spent so much time developing your project plan for your TPM project that the last thing you want is to have to change it. But that is the reality in TPM projects. Scope change always seems to add more work. Did you ever receive a scope change request from your client that asked you to take something out? Not too likely. The reality is that the client discovers something else they should have asked for in the solution. They didn't realize that or know that at the beginning of the project. That leads to more work, not less. The decision to use TPM models is clear. Use TPM models when specifications are as stable as can be. The architects of the APM and xPM models knew how stability of specifications affected choice of PMLC model and so designed approaches that expected change and were ready to accommodate it. You'll see how WBS stability and ...