Functional or Projectized

"With respect to how that relates to the industry's movement towards an Agile structure, I feel as though the increased authority and independence provided a PM within the projected environment a better foundation for transition to an agile structure."

Agile is about self managed teams but in order to succeed we need more authority in the hands of the PM. This simply does not make any sense to me.

With Scrum I have learned from this site that in order to have self-managed teams more managers are needed now I found out that more authority for the managers is also needed.

Hi Sergio. To be blunt, if you believe that agile methodologies (or for that matter any PM methodology) are unaffected by organizational structure which inherently influences the culture of any team or organization...you're wrong.

Structure is only one of the variables inside the business layer (which is one of the layers that compones the enterprise architecture) to take into account but organizations can apply agile with any type of structure. In fact, is what I am doing from 1995 up to date. It is impossible to throw away the silos oriented or functional oriented architecture commonly finded into today organizations to create a new one. Obviously, you can say "impossible is nothing" and I agree with you. At the end is a matter of impact analisys which is the first thing to do each time organizations desire to introduce something to do something as part of their strategy.On the other side, Agile is not about to use a methodology.

I respectfully disagree. I think many if not most PMs would love to have formal authority over the project team members so that they could motivate them or on the other hand threaten them with punishments if they don't deliver on time. However they don't get that.

In order to manage people you must have been in their shoes so that you can understand the difficulties they face while they do their work. A PM only cares about delivering on time at all costs. A functional managers cares more about his people that usually have the same profession as he does.

Also functional managers are always senior employees members of the management team while PMs can even be very junior employees who have recently graduated from college and have a few years of work experience. It would be ridiculous to have junior employees managing more senior employees.

I agree with that. Spot on mate

Adrian -

You can't motivate team members regardless of your authority. You can try to inspire them which in turn MAY motivate them.

I've worked with some great PMs who had zero formal authority but through their servant-leadership, high EQ and excellence at developing positive relationships with their team members and functional managers were able to get highly motivated teams.

I've also worked with some horrible PMs who had formal authority but thought everything boiled down to carrots and sticks.

I'm surprised you feel a PM only cares about delivering on time at all costs - to me, that's a weak PM. I know they are out there, but I wouldn't make that generalization for the profession.

I also wouldn't feel that functional managers are always senior employees - I've seen enough technical experts promoted in spite of their low people skills into functional management.

Kiron