Reflections on the functional relationship between project efforts and its complexity

1. If the complexity of the project increases and approaches to the upper limit of its feasible value Wf, then the effort consumed on the project increases sharply because of the increasing number of errors and endless design iterations. For that reason the work of the project team gradually becomes unfeasible (Fig.1).

Fig.1. Functional relationship between project effort E and the complexity W of the project 2. Each specific project is a trade-off between competitiveness of the project (which requires complexity increase) and the feasibility of the project (which requires complexity reduction). Therefore each realm of human activity has its own trade-off range (Fig.2) (http://www.scribd.com/doc/113818423/Human-Effort-Dynamics-andSchedule-Risk-Analysis). 3. It is important to note that the majority of human actions and activities take place in the linear range of this relationship but the most critical actions, activities and decisions are take place in the nonlinear range. In other words the whole progress of human society is concentrated in the nonlinear realm including advanced project work and research projects of fundamental nature. 4. Traditional methods of project effort estimation do not take into account this fact which might be one of the reasons of big effort estimation errors (Fig.3).

Fig.2 Advanced project works are concentrated in the nonlinear range of the curve

Fig.3 Effort estimation error of traditional methods increases sharply close to the upper limits of feasible complexity of the project