The answer is an unequivocal – maybe.  I’ve spent the past 30 years executing and teaching project management.  Early in my teaching days, I taught my corporate students that project management was scalable.  What worked on a small project would work on a large project. 

Then I was introduced to system engineering projects.  These are typically multi-year efforts incorporating a wide range of technical disciplines and involving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.  (Think of the development of the Boeing 787 as a system engineering project.) The project management I had been teaching was not scalable to these massive efforts.  These efforts did not need more project management; they needed a different approach, an approach that combined project management, project administration and systems engineering (or technical project management).

I taught my students that scope defined the project boundaries. In fact, I used to use a picket fence to demonstrate the concept.  I was thinking in terms of a yard, surrounding a house, not overly complicated, and the interfaces to the outside world were all standardized: electricity, water, sewer streets, etc. 

Now change the paradigm to a putting a fence around a college campus.  The scope document still creates boundaries; however, I now need to define requirements within those boundaries.  For example, a house needs to be heated and cooled, so do the buildings on a college campus.  When I define the requirements of the house, I am just looking at various mechanical options: heat pump, electric, gas, fuel oil, geothermal, solar.  When I look at the college campus I have all of those options, but I also need to decide if I am going to centralize or decentralize the functionality.  Do I generate heating and cooling at the building level, the sub campus level or the entire campus?  If I take a campus wide approach, what additional capabilities do I need, like infrastructure?

As the project complexity changes, so does the management of the activities. The project management necessary to build a house does not scale up to the management capabilities necessary to develop a campus.  The skills necessary to build a campus, however, can be scaled back to manage the building of a house.

Therefore, project management is scalable, but the scalability is from complex to simple, not from simple to complex. 

Teach your organization how to manage the complex projects and they will also gain the ability to manage the typical project.  PD Mentors project management training programs are based on the skills necessary to manage complexity.