The Complex Project Toolkit Using design thinking to transform the delivery of your hardest projects

The essential guide for project managers and leaders. Project managers are often responsible for big teams and millions (sometimes billions) of dollars to deliver successful outcomes on time and within budget. But the reality is, most complex projects don't live up to their promise - they often fail, under-deliver or get delivered but burn out everyone in the process. Author and experienced project manager, Kieran Duck, argues that this is because the normal approach to project management doesn't work when projects are complex. The traditional emphasis on certainty and predictability comes from an industrial era where the focus was on controlling resources and effort. These days projects are unpredictable, they are emergent and performance relies on the opinions of key stakeholders and team members. The Complex Project Toolkit provides a way through this. Based on the concepts of design thinking, this comprehensive toolkit adds to existing project management approaches with new mindsets, practices and skills that will lift the performance of your most ambitious projects and improve the experience for everyone involved.

Kieran Duck has over 25 years’ experience in running complex projects and transforming organisations, both as a consultant and as an executive responsible for delivery. He has redesigned and rescued multi-billion-dollar projects, and led business transfor­mations that open up new possibilities and ways of working for organisations and the people within them using the techniques outlined in his first book The Complex Project Toolkit.  He has presented globally on using design thinking to drive step changes in business transformations and has been a keynote speaker at offsites for companies looking to improve their strategy and program delivery performance. He has presented at univer­sity courses on project and change management. Holding a Bachelor of Computer Science and a Master of Business Administration, Kieran has a strong analytical back­ground. However, spending three years in a design firm opened up a whole new language and toolkit for him. Drawing upon that experience, he developed this unique approach to project management.