Does Lean & Agile Project Management Help Coping with Project Complexity?

Still, projects in the construction sector are delivered with time delays and cost overruns. One of the reasons for poor performance was assigned to project complexity. A combination of lean construction and agile project management are hypothesized as a possible solution to cope with project complexity. In this paper we aim to understand if the implicit usage of lean and agile help coping with complexity. The research was done by means of correlation analysis on data gathered from a structured questionnaire (67 responses). In total, 51 significant correlations among 255 possible relations were found. To reduce the number of variables, factor analysis was performed. Correlation analysis on the defined factors showed 8 significant correlations among 25 relations. Several lean and agile elements were shown to significantly correlate to either reducing complexity or managing complexity. It was therefore concluded that these are promising to cope with complexity and improve project performance, which is to be confirmed in subsequent research.