Dynamic Control of Projects

After the obligatory courses of project management and process management, this course challenges you to reflect upon dynamic control of projects. How should we organize our projects such that we can better deal with dynamics?

Each project (green field, brown field) is an intervention in an existing situation. The aim is to incorporate a project (system) into an existing environment. This environment is increasingly complex, hence influencing the project.

A project is a specific and unique endeavor, which needs time for its development with a number of subsequent phases: design, engineering, implementation, etc. In most cases:

1. the state of the environment (politics, stakeholders, regulations, etc.) at the start of a project is totally different from the state of the environment during the project, at the end of the project and certainly during the operation phase during the lifetime of the system,

2. the information and knowledge about the desired system in its environment increases dramatically during the project, which leads to different views and options and

3. the state of the technology to be applied in a project changes during a project.

As a consequence, we often develop systems with the ideas of yesterday and with todays technology for tomorrows people. And that's where dynamic control comes into place: we need to be able to act dynamically: the only certainty we have is that uncertainty will hit our projects!

To create value, we should not only work dynamically in an adaptive way with continuous change, but also take care that the systems we deliver are adaptable to changing circumstances. Inevitably, the traditional project management should realize that the construction world will also be a part of the new short-cyclic and circular economy. We need to play with complexity; allow for more dynamic approaches in project management and to strive for solutions that maximize value. We need to reorganize our project organization and rethink project delivery models, exploring the further use of digital support tools.