Shaping the future of multidimensional project management in retail industry using statistical and big data theories

IT projects are by nature, complex and chaotic with a significant proportion failing, assessed as ‘not meeting requirements’, experiencing overruns in time, budget or scope or not determined acceptable by sponsors and stakeholders. This paper presents a literature review, focused on defining a project initiation and governance framework rooted in complexity theory and bound to the Liminal Cynefin framework with the potential to transform IT project management by understanding projects from the intersection of chaos, complexity and constraints theories. The findings would assist decision makers in the project management industry to assess the potential complexity of a project in the Concept, Validate and Plan stages, matching these results with adaptive governance models and adaptive project management leadership in order to improve project outcomes. With the traditional hard paradigm of the project management industry advocating quantitative measures of project success criteria and projects still failing against these measures, an analysis of historical projects against an amalgamation of current developments in chaos, complexity and constraints theories, combined with alignment to the Cynefin framework is proposed.