Project Management - Blog 7 - Organisational Structure

Project Management Structure

Figure 1  Typical Project Organisation Chart

An organisation with an excellent CEO, super hard-working employees, with all the same common goals can still fail if the company has a poor organisational structure. Success, while based on organisation, it is generally the structure that has an influence on project management. This can dictate the level of project management, how decisions are made within the project process, communication of project goals and overall how the leadership or project manager integrates with the project team. The primary goal or objective of this structure is to reduce confusion and any uncertainty that may arise at the initial phase of a project. This structure defines the relationships within the company. Applying this structure and implementing the correct organisation structure is the difficult part of the process and key to having successful projects. Wrongly placed project teams create negative effect on the conclusion of projects.

Functional structure is very similar to a hierarchy type of system where a functional manager has a lot more authority driven decisions on their shoulders whereby the project manager in this type of structure has less decisions or may not even exist. This type of structure would suit both a book publisher or consultancy firm as they would require divisions such as human resources, finance, legal department, sales etc.

Dedicated teams type of organisational structure is whereby let’s say employee A is a member of team 1, he or she is full-time member of team 1. They’re not assigned to different project simultaneously. This would be a super example for let’s say an advertising agency whereby a dedicated team are assigned to one project and until that project is completed they only work on that project in an ideal world. An advertising agency would also suit the next example of a matrix structure, especially if this agency is a multinational.

Matrix structure is probably the most complicated out of the 3 discussed so far. Unlike the traditional hierarchy type of structure, the matrix or grid type of setup include for employees to have numerous reporting relationships generally to several different managers such as product or functional. This type of structure allows specific individuals to be handpicked for specific needs of a project, allows a project team to be more dynamic and view issues from outside the box.