How to manage "difficult" project?

The topic today is one of the many questions that has been discussed in many forums in the project management community. To try to answer this, first we have to define what do we regard as a "difficult" project.

When talking about difficult project, people usually link this up with "big project" at the first instinct - projects having a wide scope, projects involving a large number of users, or projects introducing numerous changes in multiple systems.

Let's try to think about this question in another way. Consider in a theoretical case that a project can be divided in pieces with equal size, which can be evenly assigned to a team of people, who can work individually and with no dependency to other's work. In such case, once the work schedule for each member is estimated, that would contribute to the overall project timeline. That would mean, no matter how "big" is the project, given there's sufficient amount of skilled workers, the project can eventually be finished when the time comes.

Obviously there's no such theoretical project in the real-life. First of all, projects can never be divided in equal piece, but this is not the main point. What's the most important part is that we are living in a world where each of us depends on one another. For example, we work on our domain to produce result which benefit one another, and at the same time we also rely on another domain to provide necessary input to us. While a project introduces changes to an existing function, inevitably the change may cause impact to the others. This creates the dependencies and makes the project scope difficult to confine, and it's this dependency that can cause a project "difficult" to manage.

Full article can be found in @medium