Behind Every Effective Project: A Hierarchy

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Organizational Project Management  

How does your organization and its hierarchy have an effect on your projects and project management? The answer is dependent upon the type of organizational structure you have in place.

Lack of structure in an organization can create logjams where it becomes difficult to make progress because ownership of basic project components is not established or is poorly managed. For example:

• putting too many people in charge of overseeing tasks and requiring consensual approval
• having financial conflicts and mismanagement due to inadequate processes and difficulties stemming from shared resources
• routinely prioritizing everyday work duties ahead of project deliverable tasks

Here are some examples of structures that demonstrate how each has a different effect…

Structure by Function
An organization with a function-based hierarchical design follows the dictates of a more traditional corporate culture, with divisions and groups being defined by their chief tasks (such as sales, development, operations, testing, etc.).

As a result, each unit operates on its own separate agenda, and insulated groups within the unit are managed through functional directors. This management layer often reviews and assigns tasks to subordinates, keeps an eye on project work and performs staff evaluations and compensation review.

An organization following this design does not …

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