Project Management

Week 4- Mar Chap 4

3 Major types of Organizational structures: functional, pure project and matrix

Advantage and disadvantage of these 3 types
Describe informal organization
Develop stakeholder analysis
Difference between work group and a team
Describe and apply concept of learning cycles and lessons learned from
knowledge management

According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, the area of project human
resource management entails: (1) organizational planning, (2) staff acquisition, and
(3) team development.
Organizational planning focuses on the roles, responsibilities, and relationships
among the project stakeholders. These individuals or groups can be internal or
external to the project. Moreover, organizational planning involves creating a project
structure that will support the project processes and stakeholders so that the project
is carried out efficiently and effectively.
Staff acquisition includes staffing the project with the best available human
resources. Effective staffing involves having policies, procedures, and practices to
guide the recruitment of appropriately skilled and experienced staff. Moreover, it
may include negotiating for staff from other functional areas within the
organization.
Team development involves creating an environment to develop and support the
individual team members and the team itself.
- Three primary organizational structures-the functional, project, and matrix

In my opinion, functional organizational structure works best for small companies that focus
on a single product or service to their clients. These types of organizations create
different divisions which work for that particular project function. For example, I work in an
organization - NimbleUser which is a functional organization or we can call it as a
hierarchical structure. Here teams are divided in Product Development, Product
Management, Client Services, Sales, Marketing, Operations and HR. So, all these teams
focus on different areas of an Information Technology serving for a common goal to provide
its quality product to their various clients. The product remains same for the entire client but
it has different customizations provided according to the clients need and services which
they requested for.
To serve a single product, cross functional work in a team is required to complete a task and
deliver an efficient product on time. Here, each department is aware about the work done by
other departments to understand the entire process of delivering the product to a client. The
overall knowledge helps them to keep a broad knowledge about the organization and its
work. Also, the employee has both technical and organizational business knowledge which
can be helpful while working with other teams.