Complex IT Projects in Education: The Challenge

Complexity is a new concept in project management that becomes more and more important when dealing with today’s projects. The term “complexity” in project management moved from the status of attribute to the status of discipline. IT projects display even more traits of complexity due to the new technologies involved and to the traits of innovation and unpredictability associated with them. An IT project in education is primarily an education project, and typical project and software models and metrics are not applicable as such, which raises the complexity of IT projects in education to an even higher level.The project management theories have starting to evolve since the late 1990s to incorporate a dimension of complexity. Still, these are not fully integrated. And especially in education, the development of a framework methodology for the setup and management of complex projects is required in order to tackle with the complexities of combining the intrinsic complexity of IT projects, the education aspects and the risks introduced by the wide range of stakeholders involved in major education transformations.