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Introduction
A project is a temporary and unique endeavour undertaken to deliver a result. This result is always a change in the organization, whatever it is in its processes, performance, products or services. This transformation consists then in a gap between a start and a final state. Time and resources are consumed to produce results, which may be deliverables and/or performance improvement and/or resource improvement (skills, knowledge). Each project is unique because there is always at least one of the following parameters that changes: targets, resources and environment. As projects became more and more apparent in organizations, and as they have much larger amounts at stake, it became impossible to sustain them without specific and rigorous methodology. As a consequence, project management was created as a formalized and structured methodology. It is usually admitted that modern project management appeared during World War II and was initially dedicated to big military and construction projects.
Project management has then grown up and spread around the world to become what it is today, that is to say a set of theories, principles, methodologies and practices, sometimes included in standard body of knowledge as Project Management Institute ([28] PMI, 2004) and International Project Management Association ([14] IPMA, 2006a). The current vision tends to rely upon the notions of planning and control to propose models and prescriptions as ways to increase the ability of humans to control complex worlds ([29] Stacey, 2001; [36] Wood, 2002). It emphasises the role of project actors regarding the issues of time, cost and scope ([8] Cicmil and Hodgson, 2006).
For all practical purposes, lots of studies have been done, based on statistical calculations or surveys. Their conclusion is that current methods have shown their limits, since they cannot face anymore the stakes of ever growing project complexity. Limits and lacks have indeed been detected in research as well as in industry about the project predictability, since usual parameters (time, cost and quality) are clearly not sufficient to describe properly the complete situation at a given time ([22] Meijer, 2002; [16] Jaafari, 2003; [35] Williams, 1999).
This paper aims then at describing the concept of project complexity due to a large literature review in order to understand what the underlying notions behind this concept are....