A Multidimensional Model of Project Leadership

Abstract

According to ASCE’s Vision 2025, “to lead and execute complex projects that involve many and varied stakeholders and meaningful collaboration, civil engineers will have to command the multidisciplinary, multicultural, team-building, and leadership aspects of their work.” In the traditional iron triangle of project management, the project leader’s responsibility is to balance cost, schedule, and quality constraints to meet the owner’s needs, which define the scope of the project. The iron triangle has lost much of its validity because it assumes only three dimensions of constraints, when in fact constraints can arise from multiple dimensions. Therefore, in addition to managing multidisciplinary, multicultural teams, civil engineers will have to optimize constraint tradeoffs arising from multiple dimensions. This paper describes a multidimensional construct for project leadership involving the use of partnerships to manage tradeoffs among dynamic, interconnected project constraints through the exploration of several case studies in which a broader definition of partnering has been successfully enacted.