Relationships Between Project Complexity and Communication

The Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) industry delivers increasingly complex projects to maximize project value. This complexity requires communication, but the AEC industry struggles to leverage information technology to facilitate communication. Also, theory lacks methods to evaluate communication, complexity, and their relationships. First, the authors apply complexity and virtual design and construction research to develop a method for evaluating product, organization, and process (POP) complexity. Second, through project team interviews, the authors develop a communication evaluation method. The method evaluates (1) collaboration within projects, (2) sharing between projects, and (3) strategic understanding across the firm or industry. Applying these two evaluation methods to the case studies, the authors validate the usefulness of the methods and establish a trend between increased POP complexity and increased communication challenges. The two evaluation methods provide the opportunity for teams to learn from and improve upon their communication strategies. By increasing the awareness of the relationship between complexity and communication, the paper aims to motivate and provide foundation for the development of more efficient and effective communication tools.