Project Management Fractals: Position Paper

for Curriculum Integration

Ernest L. Owens Jr.

, Ameeta Jaiswal-Dale

and Abby Bensen

Department of Project Management, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas,

2115 Summit Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55105 U.S.A.

Department of Finance, Opus College of Business, University of St. Thomas,

1000 LaSalle Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55403 U.S.A.

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

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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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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