Projects and processes are very similar as both can be described as a series of steps that should lead to a goal with a certain quality within a given time and budget restricted by available resources. The difference is that projects run once and processes run again and again, though in fact processes should be continuously improved and projects should learn from previous projects, so basically they are the same.

Why add modeling to the toolset of project managers?  A project fails when things happen that were unseen before or when their impacts were underestimated. Modeling helps to identify possible obstacles and crucial measures, to include all the available knowledge and to foster communication. When projects have to be called complex a model is the only way to overcome our mental boundaries and to analyze the dynamics and potentially nonlinear developments (namely vicious cycles). We will include factors that no classic project management tool (e.g. MS Project) would.

This tutorial shows the explorative qualitative modeling of a project. Later we will add a tutorial for descriptive quantitative modeling of projects.