Choose your weapons!
My experience is in the largest Canadian government projects, with some US and international ones. "Head sized" projects can only be of the smallest and least threatening kind. As projects get bigger they get increasingly threatening to the businessviability of the contractor and to the political capital of the government. In my experience, supported by the CHAOS report, the problem of size and complexity is badly managed, not so much by the project management team, but by senior management inboth parties to the endeavour. Unless they obtain a strategic understanding of the project and assign appropriate resources and authority , the project will not be a success. The level of senior management must correlate to the size and threat of the project, and they must demand timely status reporting. I found that even the highest levels of management could readily comprehend a project depicted on a gantt chart of 25 key events - but I suspect that this interface is seldom employed professionally.
