“Tell me what your project organization’s authority is and I’ll tell you how good your project organization is.”
What I mean is that I’ve seen many project organizations with various levels of approval, where a Project Manager (PM) needs to ask for approval even to buy toilet paper…. In the paper, the PM is responsible for the project, but in reality, they have to ask permission for everything.
In my opinion, the processes of this kind of organizations are not suited for an effective project organization.
This is very evident when you look at the processes, guidelines, procedures… of the organization. You can clearly see some organizations that have board meetings, management meetings,.. but the purpose of the organization is not to focus on projects, but to create a schedule for management to control projects. And I can understand that some kind of “routine” is necessary in those organizations, but at the same time, the organization should never forget what they do.
Some examples I’ve seen, you have a project organization that is given a mandate for a project, and then you have staff functions that constrain the project organization, turning project managers into a reporting tool to staff functions. And this could be common in organizations that combine projects and operations. 100k€ is a large amount in operations, but maybe it is not so big in a 100M€ project.
I remember once meeting a manager of a staff function in a large organization who told me for the first time that the line organization sometimes doesn’t know how the business needs to do things. (It was the first time I had seen that guy in several years of working, and he was imposing a new bureaucracy that was useless for the projects we were doing. He was coming from another part of the organization that ran operations in a completely different business…).
If your organization needs to do some projects, you have to ask yourself if the organization is really fit for purpose. It is important to define the mandate of the organization and perhaps redefine the mandate of the roles of the staff and even the various managers. Otherwise, you run the risk of PMs wasting time preparing materials and approvals to justify every step they have to take.
The project organization needs to have the project manager at the center, and the rest of the functions should support the project team.
If you create any bureaucracy…. beware!
If they have any kind of approval… beware! The only approval should come from the project sponsor or higher.
If the project sponsor, needs to have those control mechanisms towards the project organization…. beware! Maybe, i) the project sponsor should not be in that position, or ii) the project team is not the right one.
In my opinion, if you work in a project organization, the most important thing is the projects, and the organization must adapt to the projects, not the projects adapt to the organization’s schedule. This is very simple to say, but extremely difficult to put into practice when your organization has different business units with operations running for years.
It seems simple, but people working in projects, people working in operations, and people working in other functions have different ways of doing things, setting priorities…
When it comes to authority, delegation of power is also a critical element of organizational agility. If your organization demands to control everything, you may not need project managers, but project controllers….
