Organization Magnets

Functional organization

  • PMs spend half their time doing admin tasks.
  • Project managers need to clear major decisions with department managers.
  • Pms don’t set the budget.

    Projectized organization

  • Teams are organized around projects.
  • Project managers choose the team members, and release them when the project is over.
  • Project managers estimate and tract budget and schedule.

Types of organizational structures

Organic organization

  • Project management is handled as a part-time responsibility for someone on a project team.
  • Project managers are usually contributors to the project who take on the added responsibility of helping stakeholders understand project status.
  • In an organic organization, it’s likely that the project manager has little responsibility for budget decisions. Usually those kinds of decisions are made by the company owner.

    Functional organization

  • Project management decisions need to be cleared with functional managers.
  • Project managers are the functional managers in getting the work done.
  • Project managers spend lots of time doing administrative tasks and often work as PMs only part of the time.
  • You’re likely to find project expediters in functional organizations.

    Multidivisional organization

  • PMs might operate in a completely different way from division to division.
  • PMs are often project coordinators or part-time expediters who actually work on the project team as a full-time contributor but take on the added responsibility of communicating project status.
  • Decisions about budget or resource allocation need to be made by functional managers.

    Weak matrix organization

  • PMs have some authority, but they aren’t in charge of the resources on a project.
  • Major decisions still need to be made with the functional manager’s cooperation or approval.
  • Project expediters and project coordinators can work in weak matrix organizations, too.

    Balanced matrix organization

  • Project managers share authority with the functional managers.
  • PMs run their people-management decisions by the functional manager, but the functional manager runs project decisions by the PM, too.

    Strong matrix organization

  • Project managers have more authority than functional managers, but the team still reports to both managers.
  • The team might be judged based on performance on their projects, as well as on their functional expertise. In a strong matrix, delivery of the project is most important.

    Project-oriented organization

  • Teams are organized around projects. When a project is done, the team is released, and the team members move on to another project.
  • The project manager makes all of the decisions about a project’s budget, schedule, quality, and resources.
  • The PM is responsible for the success or failure of the project.

    Virtual organization

  • Virtual teams can be made up of people from many different parts of an organization who might have different reporting structures and work in different offices.
  • Project managers often take on the role of facilitating team communications on virtual teams.
  • PMs in this organizational structure sometimes have authority over budget and resource allocations.

    Hybrid organization

  • Hybrid organizations put together practices for working in predictive lifecycles with practices for working in adaptive ones.
  • Predictive lifecycles tend to rely more on management for understanding scope and status, while adaptive ones make that data transparent and focus on self-management within each other.
  • Since the teams are using a combination of practices, the way the project manager works varies along with the team.

Manage project constraints

  • Time
  • Cost
  • Scope
  • Resources
  • Quality
  • Risk

Organizational process assets

  • Process
  • Policies
  • Knowledge repositories
  • Procedures

Enterprise environmental factors

  • People
  • Market
  • Databases
  • Risk tolerance
  • Standards

Bullet Points: aiming for the exam

  • Functional managers have all the power in a functional organization. Project managers have the power in a projectized organization.
  • If a question on the exam doesn’t state an organization type, assume it’s referring to a matrix organization. That means the PM is responsible for making budgets, assigning tasks to resources, and resolving conflicts.
  • Project coordinators and expediters don’t exist in a projectized organization.
  • A project expediter keeps track of project status only. A project coordinator has some authority, and usually reports to someone higher up in the company. Neither role has as much power or authority as a real project manager, even though expediters or coordinators may have “Project Manager” printed on their business cards.

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