Project Complexities and Radar Diagram

What is Project Complexity?

A project property that makes it difficult to understand and foresee the project: can better define a project's complexity. Project complexity makes it difficult for the project managers and developers to keep its behaviour under control, even if a complete information cycle is presented. It has a consequential influence on the project's functionality as well as the predictability.

Types of Project Complexity

Basically, there are four types of project complexities. These include-

• Structural Complexity: Structural complexity is the complexity that arises when the overall task has to be divided into a specific amount of smaller tasks, acquiring an interconnection so that the task can be decomposed accordingly. This complexity arises when the task differentiation is tough.

• Directional Complexity: Directional complexity mainly arises with the stakeholders of the project, in which all the stakeholders have their opinion differences, and each of them prefers a different path rather than choosing one.

• Technical Complexity: Technical complexity means a complexity relating to a technical design or a technology that was never used before in a following project. Not only does the technical design or tool create challenges, but it also includes unclear and undefined technological knowledge.

• Temporal Complexity: Temporal complexity accounts for challenges that are observed in a project, which arise from unexpected and unidentified changes, that basically impact the future existence of the project.

Factors to Analyse Project Complexity

For a case study project: the hydrogen industry as an energy source, a radar diagram below depicts information on the weightage of different complexities.

• In this diagram, directional complexity is the highest as there will be several stakeholders, all involved due to different aims and goals of the project, thus accounting for different opinions. These overall factors influence competition and problems in the regulation of laws.  

• Temporal and structural complexity are provided comparable scores as they will remain for the short term and are not expected to arise at a critical level.

• Technical complexity has been provided a medium score as this project will require tools and methods for hydrogen production, which may have been discovered in some parts of the world.

Within a project, some context factors help in analysing these complexities. While there are a total of seven factors that analyse the project complexity, including project context connectivity belonging to autonomy diversity size and emergence, the two aspects focused on a project are complexity and connectivity. With the help of the same example, let's take a look at the factors used to analyse the project complexity. The project above has been classified according to the context and connectivity factors and are described below.

• Local laws and regulations: Specifically for the hydrogen projects, there are law and regulation complexities and challenges to switch the excessive use of hydrogen instead of carbon-related fuels. These complexities include hydrogen production complexities in the industry, fair competitiveness, deployment of regulations for the excessive use of hydrogen fuel, unestablished regulatory practices by different states and countries to adopt hydrogen as a fuel, Supply and transportation problems, etc. Hydrogen is an emerging energy source, and projects related to this enhancement face laws and regulatory issues in several regions (Gong, 2022).

• Geological condition: Geological condition, in simple terms, means the factors relevant to the earth’s surface and underground. It is well known that hydrogen is a fuel that needs a specific underground geological condition to be stored within, and for the effective transition, there are several complexities within the following project. In order to store hydrogen underground, it is important that the geological condition must be stable and no geochemical reaction must happen within the underground after storage due to natural conditions. Also, after the hydrogen production takes place from renewable energy resources, the hydrogen transportation from the production to the final usability region must be convenient enough. The geological complexity also states that a systematic infrastructure needs to be deployed for hydrogen storage, and all the risks related to the large-scale production of hydrogen must be analysed (Hassanpouryouzband et al., 2022).

• Networked environment: According to the network environment, one of the main complexities arising within a hydrogen project is the supply chain and value chain management. The supply chain will not only include the development of hydrogen but also the connectivity of hydrogen pipelines and networking and the transportation of hydrogen gas from one place to another. Overall, the supply chain as a networked environment includes project complexities within different stages (Cicenergigune, 2021).

• Cultural configuration: It is known to us that hydrogen is not produced in nature, similar to the different types of fossil fuels, but it has to be produced from different renewable energy sources, such as water. One of the main complexities in the hydrogen projects is the cultural belief and the public perception of using renewable resources such as water as a scarce option for the production of hydrogen and its acceptance in some culturally diversified areas. Also, it can be observed that the deployment of public policy and regulation in acceptance of hydrogen development is not observed in many geographical regions yet (Vallejos-Romero et al., 2022).

• Competition level: There is heavy competition when it comes to the emergence of new tools and methods in any specific industry; there are competitive complexities in this project, which include- cost and economic competition, storage solutions, personal rivalry, etc. (Maestre et al., 2021).

• Goals alignment: There are different goals that need to be achieved through these efficient hydrogen projects, which include financial and economic beneficial goals, climate goals, public health goals, reducing carbon footprint, etc. (UNFCC, 2023)

• Interconnection between the tasks: Interconnection between the tasks not only means the production or transportation connectivity or the production and usage connectivity, but the interconnectivity factor includes different task interconnectivity that includes sustainable production processes, transfer process, storage process, delivery, usage, project tasks, departments, etc., all within the supply chain (Energypartnership, 2022).

Complexity Type	Context Factors	Connectivity Factors
Structural Complexity	Networked Environment, Cultural Configuration	Task Interconnection
Directional Complexity	Competition Level, Laws and Regulations	Goals Alignment
Technical Complexity	Geological Conditions, Laws and Regulations	-
Temporal Complexity	Competition Level, Networked Environment	Task Interconnection

References

• Cicenergigune. (2021, November 30). Hydrogen: opportunities and challenges of its value chain. Cicenergigune.com. https://cicenergigune.com/en/blog/hydrogen-opportunities-challenges-value-chain

• Energypartnership. (2022). Main implications of the connection of hydrogen projects in medium systems Executive Summary. energypartnership. https://www.energypartnership.cl/fileadmin/user_upload/chile/media_elements/Studies/Resumen_ejecutivo_vfinal_Ingl%C3%A9s.pdf

• Gong, X. (2022). Hydrogen Projects: Legal and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities. Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law, 40(4), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/02646811.2022.2042984

• Hassanpouryouzband, A., Adie, K., Cowen, T., Thaysen, E. M., Heinemann, N., Butler, I. B., Wilkinson, M., & Edlmann, K. (2022). Geological Hydrogen Storage: Geochemical Reactivity of Hydrogen with Sandstone Reservoirs. ACS Energy Letters, 7(7), 2203–2210. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.2c01024

• Maestre, V. M., Ortiz, A., & Ortiz, I. (2021). Challenges and prospects of renewable hydrogen-based strategies for full decarbonisation of stationary power applications. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 152, 111628. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2021.111628

• UNFCC. (2023). Guiding Principles for Climate-Aligned Hydrogen Deployment. UNFCC. https://racetozero.unfccc.int/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Hydrogen-Guiding-Principles_vFinal.pdf

• Vallejos-Romero, A., Cordoves-Sánchez, M., Cisternas, C., Sáez-Ardura, F., Rodríguez, I., Aledo, A., Boso, Á., Prades, J., & Álvarez, B. (2022). Green Hydrogen and Social Sciences: Issues, Problems, and Future Challenges. Sustainability, 15(1), 303. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15010303