Project Management 101

Lesson 3: Fundamental Project Concepts: Part 2

Projectized Organizations

Our next challenge is to take a look at this strange beast called The Projectized Organization.

Actually, this beast isn't that strange at all, but becomes strange due to the fact that, by virtue of having the word project in its title, people refer to any organization that does project-work as a projectized organization. And this is, as you can guess, not the case.

So let's clarify this little confusion right now with a help from the PMBOK. A projectized organization is one in which project members (those people formally assigned to work on a specific project) are often collocated. Because of its modular design (think of pieces of lego that can detach and re-attach somewhere else), projectized organizations devote most of their resources to project work, and Project Managers enjoy a great deal of authority, responsibility, and in some cases, free coffee.

Projectized organizations thus derive their name from the fact that they are built to do project work; people can be re-assigned to projects swiftly, accounting systems are in place to track labour and resource costs efficently, and Project Managers are given both the authority, and the responsibility, to manage virtually all aspects of the project.

Sounds like the perfect place to work, huh? Well, it can be if you're a Project Manager and there is enough work to sustain continuous project-related work. But it can also be a very volatile place to work, and a real miserable place for those that don't enjoy extremely fast-paced, deadline oriented workplaces.

Perfect projectized organizations don't really exist in nature (not unlike a perfect vacuum or a perfectly good Made for TV Movie). But organizations that emphasize their projectized-ness (err..) certainly do exist, usually in the IT and constructions fields, but other places as well (such as educational consulting).

So as to round our our understanding of organizational structures, I'd also like to touch upon two other flavors of organizations in which Project Manager's: functional organizations and matrix orgnaizations.

Functional organizations reflect the hierarchial structure that has dominated organizational charts for the last few centuries. This is the structure in which each person is placed on a pyramid, and reports to a very clear and visible supervisor/manager, who in turn reports to a Vice President, who in turn reports to a person who you've never met in person or heard from, yet spends a great deal of time wearing dark blue pin-striped 3-piece suits and having their portrait painted while they practice looking astonishingly inanimate. Project Managers who work in these types of organizations typically have little authority and power, and often have to wrestle with functional managers (e.g. the Vice President of something or other) in order to have resources devoted to the project.

Of course I'm being colorful here, functional organizations are not nightmares for Project Managers, but one of the challanges that a Project Manager will face in this environment is receiving enough attention "from the top" paid to their project. It's a great idea, in these situations, to have a Project Coordinator, which is simply a person at an executive level who will fight for your project to obtain the resources it needs (including coffee).

Matrix orgnizations try and synthesize aspects of the projectized and the functional organizations. I use the word try not facetiously, but rather pragmatically: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Two types of matrix organizations exist, weak ones and strong ones. Weak ones lean towards the functional world and thus don't route a lot of authority to Project Managers, while stronger ones lean towards the projectized end of the spectrum and route more power to the Project Manager.

References used in this section(these books are available for order via the Resources link above):

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, by the Project Management Institute. Chapter 2.