Project Management Fractals: Position Paper
for Curriculum Integration
Ernest L. Owens Jr.
1
, Ameeta Jaiswal-Dale
2
and Abby Bensen
3
1
Department of Project Management, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas,
2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105 U.S.A.
2
Department of Finance, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas,
1000 LaSalle Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55403 U.S.A.
3
Department of English, University of St. Thomas, 2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105 U.S.A.
Keywords: Curriculum Integration, Fractal, Course Design, Pedagogical Improvement, Project Management,
Interdisciplinary Courses, Business Risks, Business-Ready Graduates, Capstone Course.
Abstract: This position piece, based on 30 years of teaching, argues for incorporating the notion of fractals into project
management education to create business-ready graduates who can tailor a project process method to the
project. By looking at the project in smaller pieces (fractals) and the relationship between those pieces,
practitioners can achieve a deeper understanding of the project without being overwhelmed by its complexity.
Project management pairs well with fractals because of its interdisciplinary nature—the idea of fractals in
project management incorporates application of numerous business disciplines, creating graduates who are
comfortable with both theory and practice.
1 INTRODUCTION
This paper is an opinion piece based on 30 years of
teaching project management to executives,
professionals in the discipline, and graduate and
undergraduate students. During this time, we have
worked with the different project methods and
followed the PMBOK by PMI as it transitioned from
a skills-based platform to a seminal certification of
practitioners. The central narrative has been to define
methods such as the process-based method
(Waterfall) and other methods under the Agile
umbrella (SCRUM, KANBAN, Extreme Project
Management, etc.). Three of these methods—
Waterfall, SCRUM and KANBAN—are the primary
methods used in curriculums to teach project
management. They all teach project management as a
system, but we believe that they do not get at the
common fractal and interconnectivity by which
1
This position paper is intended for practitioners training
new recruits and for instructors in business schools
preparing graduates to be team players and future
practitioners of outcome-based business applications.
Although not a research paper, the piece addresses the
students can understand the commonality of all the
methods and thus be better prepared for its
implementation in business. We believe this method
of a project management fractal builds all versions
and methods of project management clearly and
simply, making them more accessible for business
curriculum integration.
1
2 DEFINITION
A fractal is a geometric figure wherein each part of
the whole has the same characteristics in a never-
ending pattern of various size (Oxford, n.d.). These
patterns are common in natural systems (e.g.,
snowflakes and tree branches) and can be
extrapolated into organizational processes. The
fractal we are working with in this paper is the
relation of a task and its predecessor relationships.
notions mentioned in the keywords and
complements the research classified below.
JEL Classification: F60; G31 and G41; M11 and M16
Owens Jr., E., Jaiswal-Dale, A. and Bensen, A.
Project Management Fractals: Position Paper for Curriculum Integration.
DOI: 10.5220/0011088200003206
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Finance, Economics, Management and IT Business (FEMIB 2022), pages 123-129
ISBN: 978-989-758-567-8; ISSN: 2184-5891
Copyright
c
2022 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
123
Knowing some simple rules, we can build even the
most complex projects and define the right project
management approach.
The narrative of fractals becomes important to the
field of project management because the Project
Management Institute has put forth its concept of
project tailoring in the newly released Project
Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK 7) in the
fall of 2021. Tailoring is the act of the project
manager and team assessing the right methodology
for the project solution. We agree with PMI that
tailoring is key to project success, but we believe it
must be done at the lower level of project design. This
does not mean the project must be totally fleshed out;
however, it does mean the practitioners must consider
time, risk, constraints, and cost at the task and
predecessor level. The execution of these elements
drives the project methodology.
3 POSITION
Our observation is that most students and
unsophisticated practitioners do not fully understand
the need to proactively manage a project method or
process. Most of their experience has been
approaching projects as a loose set of actions, where
they do not see the impact of the project on the
programs, cost/revenue effort, and client satisfaction.
Often, the established way of teaching a project
system does not fully appreciate the effort to
implement a project, and upon completing the course,
many attendees may fall back into their old ways of
control and working a series of tasks rather than a
system of outcomes. Our position is that fractals will
alter and improve the established way of teaching by
defining micro actions—task analysis—that help
identify congruences between tasks, and the
connection between a task and its predecessor. We
believe this will allow project management students
more clearly grasp what they are trying to execute.
Most instructors define curriculum by focusing on
the set of outcomes projects are to deliver. The basic
process of deconstructing the problem or requested
delivery tends to revolve around setting a definition
for the scope of work, identifying who will be doing
the work, defining a timeline, assessing a cost, then
managing a team and the associated risks. The pros
for this method are 1) project managers try to lay out
the whole ecosystem of the project so participants
clearly understand their charge and role to create a
successful set of deliverables, and 2) the process leads
to well-defined statements of what needs to be done.
The cons for this method are 1) it takes time to create
well-defined actions to execute and has become
costly and cumbersome, particularly in a venue where
time is a factor in getting to clients before your
competitor, and 2) the lack of clarity causes risk and
liability through errors.
We propose that instructions go down to the task
level to talk about what is common to all methods and
how that basic process is tweaked to create the
different project management approaches. The
element of the basic fractal is the notion of a
dependent task and its predecessor task and some
constraints that must be understood to grasp the
different approaches to project design. In the recently
released PMBOK 7 (pgs. 131- 152), PMI calls this
“tailoring.” We believe the PMBOK does not get into
what is tailored at the elemental level. We feel that
some constraints of our fractal narrative need
assessing time, relationships between the dependent
and predecessor task, and the associated risks that
emerge as time and dependencies change. We will use
the Waterfall and SCRUM methods to show how the
project fractal can help practitioners and students
work in a task-oriented way to build their comfort
with project systems and methods, and how to choose
(tailor) their project process more comfortably for the
desired outcomes.
Focusing on the task level of the project
minimizes oversimplicity and ambiguity. When
dealing with projects, having a goal to complete a
system or series of processes drives practitioners to
be uncomfortable. Yet, the reach of understanding
what is happening on a task level and how it happens
is digestible. Allowing practitioners to focus on a
subsection and its viability allows them to put the
pieces together into a larger whole. As they pull the
project subtasks together, they can again look at how
a subcomponent relates to other subcomponents for
internal consistency. This induction of fractal
relationships makes the deduction of projects from
summary task to subtask to lower-level subtask
produce congruency between project methodology
and project viability. Knowing the structure of the
relationships at the lower level of the project plan
based on time, resourcing, and constraints can change
the level of effort to plan and design the project
process.
Based on teaching experience, we will provide
evidence “discipline by discipline” for how to apply
fractals as a tool for curriculum integration. This will
allow educators of different expertise to focus on how
their subject matter can be taught and integrated into
the project process plan.
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4 SECTION 1
4.1 The Interdisciplinary Attributes of
a Course in Project Management
Most programs have an interdisciplinary capstone
course that brings together siloed topics (Rhee et al.,
2014; Magnanti & Natarajan, 2018; Munroe, 2016),
but a review of literature revealed that the concept is
rarely found bringing together the various disciplines
within business. The purpose of an interdisciplinary
course design in Project Management specifically is
two-fold: it is a useful tool for students to combine
their knowledge of business disciplines, and it brings
theory into practice (Mazzetto, 2016). Calling upon
the interdisciplinary subjects in business education,
projects can be thought of as planning and executing
problem solutions. Once the project is successfully
executed and the deliverable emerges, the project
ends, though the deliverable can continue. The
dominant way project management is taught is
through a Waterfall or Agile (SCRUM) model. We
are going to drill down into the Waterfall and Agile
methods to show how fractals can be used.
Figure 1: Basic Fractal of Project Management.
Time can be a major indicator of whether the
project methodology should be Waterfall or Agile.
Waterfall allows more time to explore the
relationships between tasks, meaning more time to
comprehend potential setbacks and risk in the project
design. Understanding these relationships between
tasks can provide stakeholders and clients with more
comfort that the outcome is well understood, and the
project is quite deterministic.
Should the PM need to execute the project swiftly
(“ready, fire, aim” syndrome) and not dwell on the
accuracy of the relationships between tasks, recursive
or Agile project planning may be the best approach.
The focus is to get moving and fail fast (Accardi-
Petersen, 2011), then redefine the next set of actions
or tasks based on the interim learning. This
presupposes that cost is not a major driver; rather,
strategic impact and the imperative to get something
done are the key criteria. With Agile, connection
between tasks is not well understood or is very fluid,
so clarity in the task relationships is not essential.
Essentially, perception of motion and action is
preferred over plotting and planning. Watching
someone plan does not leave participants feeling the
work is getting done. Actual physical motion and
engagement of stakeholders produces the feeling that
time is being spent productively.
The KANBAN method is very useful in helping
students understand the relationship between task and
the completeness of work being planned. Students,
sponsors, and faculty can work on a simple high-level
understanding of the project work while also learning
the potential relationship between a task and its
predecessor. While exploring the basic level of task
relationships, the KANBAN method allows for group
interaction to occur in defining the relationships of
task with potential predecessor tasks.
Figure 2: KANBAN - Project Status Tool.
KANBAN is great for a project icebreaker in that
students can start thinking about project definition
without spending much time on the complexity of the
relationships, scheduling, and resourcing. We have
observed good team-building moments as the
students work together orally and spatially trying to
convince each other what is being requested. The
natural flow is towards a much richer effort using the
Waterfall or SCRUM methodology.
The Waterfall fractal approach begins with a plan and
a good idea of the end goal. The essence of the
project’s logic is the basic relationship between the
desired project conclusion and the summary task (top
level) required to execute the project based on the
process approach. The practitioner studies and
constructs how the predecessor summary task feeds
into the final project outcome to produce with greater
certainty the desired deliverables. Looking at each
summary task, defining what summary task proceeds
it, and identifying the relationship between the tasks
clarifies the appropriate way to succeed at the project
Project Management Fractals: Position Paper for Curriculum Integration
125
outcome. Interactions between task dependencies,
task constraints, calendar scheduling, unit costing,
and risk assessment produce an in-depth
understanding of how the predecessor task influences
the task of interest. The more certainty of this
relationship required, the more the time constraint
expands. It requires the team to spend time
investigating the internal connections between the
tasks, and if you are traveling from the earth to mars,
those internal relationships are crucial. If human lives
are at stake, you want clarity in the outcome, not
quickness to completion.
Figure 3: Process Based Approach – A Waterfall Approach.
Agile, becoming extremely popular, experiences
far more changes in the process to the deliverable and
encourages a fail-fast mindset (Accardi-Petersen,
2011). Agile is useful in military campaigns because
soldiers train to navigate a variety of scenarios
because the outcome is not clear. Business examples
of Agile are software development, medical devices,
bioengineering, and many areas of cutting-edge
technology.
The Agile method can be incorporated into the
curriculum to demonstrate the impact of uncertainty
and continual changes in requirements on the project
and practitioners. The fractal elements are the same
as in Waterfall, but the focus is on the ability to
redefine the task of interest as the predecessor task
changes based on changing requirements from the
stakeholders in the project. Because the requirements
are fluid, so are the relationships between tasks.
Therefore, focusing on relationships is an inefficient
use of time. Agile’s guiding force is the willingness
to iterate the project task until a minimal viable
outcome emerges that all the stakeholders feel
suffices as success. Focusing on outcome flexibility
removes the constraint on cost, resources, and
schedule and introduces a different type of risk—a
lack of flexibility to modify. Should the internal
relationships become more important than the ability
to change, Agile becomes less attractive. The notion
of the daily scrum allows flexibility to change the
predecessor task, thereby redefining the project into
very small-time increments. The project team must be
very comfortable with uncertainty, which most
students and practitioners are not good with. So,
teaching Agile is teaching not just failing fast but also
the unnatural behaviour of working without clear
direction.
Figure 4: Agile (SCRUM) Methodology – Iterative.
Core to the two methods above is the tacit
knowledge that all methods of project management
are grounded in a basic fractal. The ways these
fractals are netted together create different
methodologies and, hence, different project culture.
Project participants’ understanding of the project
management fractal will help the classroom
deconstruct the work content of the project and will
provide an inductive way to ensure the project
process method can create a successful set of
deliverables.
5 SECTION 2
5.1 Integration of Established Business
Disciplines with the Attributes of
Project Management
Now that the attributes of a project management
course are laid out, let us see how certain established
disciplines of the business curriculum connect with
these attributes to educate business-ready candidates.
In Section 2, we will provide examples of integrating
the processes of project management from Section 1
with the disciplines of marketing, finance/accounting,
operations, human resources, organizational
behaviour, and leadership. This list is by no means
exhaustive. It is a starting point for further, more
meaningful possibilities of integration.
5.1.1 Marketing
The focus of marketing is customer need, customer
expectation, and a successful response to the same. In
project management, that focus is identifying the
stakeholders—the customers to be served within the
project—and understanding their impacts on the
project design and outcomes.
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The marketing fractal focuses students on the role
of the client or customer in the task effort. If the
customer is clearly defined or crucial to the success
of the activity, practitioners should spend time
understanding the customer impact, needs, wants, and
ability to influence the project outcome. However, if
the customer is unclear and ambiguous, Agile may
require less focus on needs planned and more focus
on needs discovered during the project exercise.
5.1.2 Accounting/Pro Forma Analysis
Although successful in their class work, simply
stated, most fresh business graduates do not know the
importance of planning ahead using accounting and
pro forma analysis.
The accounting fractal bears down on the cost and
budgeting effort of the task. Should the task and the
relationships between the tasks be crucial to the
budgeting exercise or the cost control, practitioners
should spend more time and effort discerning the go
or no-go decision based on budgeting concerns.
Should the cost not even be penultimate to the project
design, then the focus on cost should be relegated to
a concern but should not delay the project based on
specificity. Cost can be assigned as the project is built
and reiterated.
5.1.3 Organization Behavior and
Leadership
The charter, a post pro forma document, is the
authorization tool that states the assembled project is
coherent, ready for kick-off, and validated by the
organization leadership and sponsor. The charter
contains commentary on the project’s feasibility,
initial team assembly, stated definition, scope to date,
high-level cost, and leadership signoff. Here, students
of management and leadership will learn that not all
projects are valid. An in-depth fractal narrative of
what is being done and where it’s being done will help
with organizational retention and use of project
learning. Project validity and clarity up front will
drive a Waterfall design and capture knowledge that
can be used in project and post-project audits. If speed
to execution and constant changing requirements are
desired, then there will be less capture of the
behaviors and leadership stories from an Agile
method. Agile teams require practitioners who can
work with lack of clarity in tasks and hold more tacit
knowledge of the relationship between tasks; hence,
this fractal design will need a more seasoned self-
reliant implementor.
5.1.4 Operations Management
How do we effectively and efficiently deliver
products or services? At the fractal level, this question
manifests as an understanding of the constraints and
assumption of how the task relate to each other. Must
the task be executed at the same time? Do we have
conditionality based on a best, most likely, or worst-
case scenario? Elements of project management aid
in learning to analyse and improve all types of
processes, and they also show how to leverage
statistics and technology to make informed
operational decisions. The Waterfall fractal enriches
the ability to discern the depth of relationships and
dependencies between the tasks. Should the task be
constrained to a lunar or financial constraint? Or does
Agile assume the defined work can be done based on
an organization’s intellect and the process’s ability to
change? The more accuracy required in the task, the
more we will default to a Waterfall approach. Agile
presupposes those requirements are dynamic and will
flow freely as we approach the daily scrum of the
sprint cycle. Using Agile will heavily depend on
insights into the relations, resources, and constraints
amongst the tasks that will not be present in nascent
practitioners.
5.1.5 Finance
The three main pillars of project management are
scheduling, cost, and resources, and all three tie
together. An impact on one affects all three. The
fractal narrative around cost flows from the impacts
of controlling and budgeting the project budget and
defining their ROI annually. This is a constant battle
between great predictions and uninformed cost
entries from project participants to the cost control
efforts. When a firm needs to focus on how well it is
doing, plans that derive good cost from well-defined
elements in the planning cycle matter. Waterfall
works to clearly define the interactions between task
and the drivers of cost that enable and hinder a good
ROI. Because agility focuses on dynamic iterative
changes in requirements and the relationships
between those requirements, cost controls can only be
best described as top-down in accuracy.
5.1.6 Risk
Risk is present, regardless of method. It comes in
many forms, but there are three key forms of project
management risk, cost, schedule, and resources.
Teasing out relationships and dependencies as you
craft the project introduces high potential for
unknown relationships between tasks to emerge. Not
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managing risk on the front-end means having to
manage risk later. Using a Waterfall approach and
identifying risk up front lowers the likelihoods of
large pay-outs, cost exposers, resource
misalignments, and missing customer expectations,
thereby reducing significant potential penalties. For
example, in a project that is putting out a computer,
there is little cost to defining and mediating risk at the
beginning of the project; however, letting that
machine go to the client’s shelf with unknown
operational, reputational, and financial issues will
exacerbate potential penalties. Risk is not a question
of if but when.
2
Risk management is a great example of the
interdisciplinary aspects of the approach. The more
we define the dependencies between the task, the
clearer risks present themselves and the more we are
likely to use the Waterfall fractal approach. Thus,
teaching risk management is a far-reaching
interdisciplinary web.
5.2 Soft Skills in the Project Fractal
5.2.1 Stakeholder Relationships between the
Task Owners
Project managers need to understand their
stakeholders’ perspectives (Ewin, Chugh, Muurlink,
Jarvis, Luck, 2021) so they can have clarity between
the task definitions and the predecessor task
relationships. The DEI (Dunn, 2020) influencers of
organizational roles along with stakeholder ethnicity,
age, gender, sexual orientation etc. can cause a
misalignment between the task owners and their task
outcomes. We have observed students culturally in
conflict with their sponsors on task activities due to
language, expressions, and perceived authority
inherent in social norms and implicit bias. In some
cases, students have incorrectly assumed a task
definition due to their lack of work experience, yet
they still challenged their sponsor ability due to social
miscues. By focusing in on individual project fractals,
the faculty, sponsor, and student can audit or explore
their assumption whether they are sharing the same
story or narrative between the task, thereby knitting a
tight story through the project schedule.
2
This is the concept of “Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later,” so
the company either pays preventative money (costs
associated with activities specifically designed to prevent
poor quality in products) or appraisal money (costs
associates with activities specifically designed to measure,
5.2.2 Communications
How the dependencies and relations are
communicated may also influence the dynamics
between the task and its predecessors. Poor
communication (Muszyńska, Marx, 2019) between
team members via lack of documentation, poor
software usage, or poor note taking may yield
inaccurate task relationships and durations, thereby
generating a misunderstanding of deliverables or
project outcomes. When this poor communication is
due to different student or sponsor needs for in-depth
participation, we have seen a lack of trust in outcomes
and quality of work. Teams with good
communication skills, whether on face-to-face,
Zoom, or phone, create a better sense of trust and
responsiveness for a shared outcome and ownership
in a quality learning experience. Students more
effectively negotiate their roles and produce the
desired level of work when they know how their parts
make the task-predecessor relationship work.
5.2.3 Resilience
Understanding stakeholder emotions and their own
needs, students have been observed struggling with
critique and criticism of their work. This critique has
frustrated and challenged their resilience (Magano et
al., 2020). We have observed that students who
understood the needs of other students working on a
predecessor task felt more comfortable in their own
work and seemed less stressed. Even when things
went wrong in the relationships, schedule, or
definition or work between the tasks, student seemed
less frustrated or bothered when they understood what
the other task impacts where on other students.
Robust communications between the team members,
sponsors, and faculty seemed to create more
commitment to a good project outcome and less
angst.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The notion of fractals, a simple and easy
methodology, is available for curriculum integration.
In today’s business context, an interdisciplinary
course design is imperative. In this piece, we have
stated that a course on project management
inspect, evaluate, or audit products to assure conformance
to quality requirements [CQE Academy, n.d.]).
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incorporating fractals may well serve as one vehicle
for interdisciplinary teaching. We found this to be
successfully received through teaching at the
University of St. Thomas in St. Paul and at the
University of Bergamo in Italy.
Feedback from our prospective student employers
reminds us that omitting a course like this in business
education is encouraging failure by default—the
program is not setting students up for success in both
theory and application in the industry. Also, not
clearly stating that project management requires
tailoring the method to the project culture and design
will create a systems approach not readily understood
by the student, sponsors, and instructors.
We conclude the project fractal narrative will give
students a tangible way to understand the content and
help them see that integration at a lower level. When
choosing the process method, students should know
whether they are executing a well-defined, highly
structured set of deliverables (Waterfall); whether the
outcome is much less defined (SCRUM); or whether
to use simple tools to show task completion
(KANBAN). These methods are not in competition,
but they are three different tools to complete a
successful project, based on the ecosystem of the
project. Instructors can create a curriculum based on
an individual with seasoned project experience, or
instruction can be knitted together with faculty of
different disciplines doing their part and explaining
how the project fractals work from their expertise.
We welcome contributions and suggestions from
colleagues to demonstrate other possible courses that
also can be a good vehicle for integrated course
offerings to make our students business ready. Our
next effort currently underway is to survey the
students and sponsors about the value of project
management and whether they perceive a difference
in systemic project teaching versus fractal project
teaching. We are using Likert scale questions and
essay questions for this next step.
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