Seminar in PM Week 1 DQR
Seminar in PM Week 1 DQR
Respond to at least two peers who have evaluated a structure that appears to be different from the one you evaluated. Compare and contrast the impact to project management among the different organizational structures.
Joseph LaPadula
I'm Joe - I live in Maine and work for a new start-up in a property technology company that is currently expanding rapidly across the country working to provide labor for large institutional buyers. . My background is all over the place but did work as a project manager for a DoD manufacturing company for a while. Not much more to say other than I recently proposed to a girl I've had a crush on since High School and over a decade later, she finally said yes.
The organization I'd like to use for this was the DoD manufacturing company. It was relatively flat, with each director being responsible for their own teams, but the Project Management Office was ultimately responsible for the success of each contract and ensuring our company met or exceeded our customer expectations.
Given that an individual contributor to a project had their performance reviews with their directors but their daily assignments often came from our PMO, it did create some friction on how our company managed projects. Ultimately, I found that building a strong rapport with each director led to alignment between individual contributors putting their best work in for a project as the directors were aligned with the project's needs and priorities. I felt this was very effective in comparison to needing to form, directly manage, and disperse teams over the short 1–2-year contracts most of our work was awarded for. For example, this worked extremely well when I needed some mechanical engineers to resolve some issues, we had with how robust a delicate camera system was. Speaking through the director, they were able to understand how this was crippling many other aspects of the build at a technical level that I could never communicate.
The issues with this are when a director was obstinate or misaligned with PMO on the work that needed to be completed. An example of this was the software director believing that the customer would want the software we were making rather than the software we were asked to make once they saw it. Regardless of my reminders of what the requirements were or raising the alarm that this was a contractual obligation we were not hitting on, we ended up delaying the delivery of our systems by a considerable amount due to missing the requirements. Even though the individual software developers knew exactly what I was trying to communicate, they did not want to work at odds to their boss.
Response –
Brooke Fisher
Hi,
I live in Massachusetts and work at a large non-profit, social services organization that has a wide variety of programs including schools, group homes, and supports for people who are chronically unemployed, homeless, or have developmental delays. My role is in quality management and fundraising and my time is spent developing a variety of systems that meet the competing needs of the organization's various programs while also collecting and centralizing the data our organization needs as a whole to seek new funding streams. I’m involved in a variety of projects including the development and deployment of large technology systems so I am excited to learn how to do this better in this class! My education background is in education and Middle Eastern politics so the world of business is relatively new to me. My decision to pursue an MBA was encouraged by my company and is part of a professional development plan designed to help me develop leadership and project management skills. My MBA focus is in Project Management.
In the organization I currently work for, organizational structure has a significant impact on project management. The organization I work at is organized similarly to a university in that there are a large number of departments often with competing needs. Overall the organization is set up as a functional organization with a top-down, linear structure. Department heads oversee a functional area (for example finance, HR, training, program management, etc.). In general this means project managers have limited authority and report to a department head (MindEdge, 1.09). When a project is undertaken within a department it is typically a low risk project with a limited budget and scope. Generally it will only impact the originating department. If a project is cross functional, impacting multiple departments or the entire organization my team is utilized. For example I am currently working as the project manager on a project to build and implement an Applicant Tracking System across the whole organization. This operational project has been designed to improve efficiency across the agency by improving our hiring practices and automating routine business tasks (Gray & Larson, 2021, p. 39). Typically project management impact the organization through operational projects but occasionally we are tasked with compliance projects as we are a human service agency and have many regulatory requirements we must meet.
There are several ways this organizational structure impacts the management of projects. The first is due to the largely segmented/siloed nature of the organization there isn’t a clear priority system that is linked to strategy. In particular the implementation gap is a problem as strategy implementation has been left to functional managers who are making independent decisions based on the needs of their departments (Gray & Larson, 2021, p. 36). This leads to conflicts between managers and a strain on resources. For example, a few years ago, I was working on a project to roll out a fundraising system across the organization. When I went to schedule a training with one department on the new system I was told they had already invested in, built, and launched another system that did the same thing. Ultimately the system they built had to be scrapped in favor of the organization wide system which resulted in wasted resources. Another problem is people are tasked with multiple projects without clear prioritization. For example I was working on building out a system to automate some client communication for one program but was also tasked with developing budget management software for another department. This resulted in two programs competing for my time as they both considered their project to be more important and split my productivity. If there had been a clear prioritization I would have been able to focus more on one, likely enabling me to finish both projects faster and without the tension the lack of prioritization caused. Ultimately, I think my organization could be much better at managing projects and I think this starts with the development of a project priority system and strategic portfolio management. I’m looking forward to taking some of the principals I learn in this class and bringing them back to my organization.
References
Gray, C. F., & Larson, E. W. (2021). Project Management: The managerial process. McGraw-Hill Education.
MindEdge. (2022). QSO 640 Project Management. Retrieved from SNHU Blackboard.
Response -