project oriented work organization and felible hierarchy

14/07/15 Presentation 1

Project Oriented Work Organization and Flexible Hierarchy

... and PMIS to support the project oriented workflow

Presentation 214/07/15

Project = Enterprise

Every project is an enterprise and every enterprise is a project in its source. It has a scope, stakeholders, workflows, work breakdown structure, practically all the project's elements. If we define a newly established enterprise as a long term project (with the company charter as a project charter), all of its business processes can be regarded as sub-projects of that parent project in a business work breakdown structure.


Project Management Office

The concept of the Project Management Office takes the role of the organization's Management, so the Project Management Office manager could be regarded as the General Manager. The figures of other traditional manager roles as Sales Manager, Logistics Manager etc. are all team members of the PMO in a traditional organization structure.


Flexible organization structure

A flexible organization structure (or flexible hierarchy) as opposed to the traditional organization structures, is naturally developed, when employees find out a better leader than the traditionally assigned one or when a group of employees join forces developing new, innovative ideas for better accomplishment of the tasks. These informal organizational structures have the ability to change as needed, without the need of the highest level decisions like in the formal hierarchic structures.


Flexible organization example

The accomplishment of a project scope is a flexible workflow and very suitable for a flexible organizational structure to manage it. The business areas where I had to deal with these kinds of structures, were large scale long term projects where groups of companies worked for the same scope and since we were not working under the safeguard of the same organization with well established traditional hierarchic structure and at the same time the project sponsor's imposed hierarchy was only formal, everything went natural way after a time and every stakeholder did its part and took its own responsibilities although there was no formal hierarchy.

A simplified way to describe it:

- traditional project management for the top layer (parent) project (administration and bureaucracy)

- agile methods for the project deliverables

The flexible hierarchic model is especially suitable in the composed organizations like it was in the former example, since they're composed by individual business entities which are not in hierarchic relation between each other. The above example also proves, that this model is suitable for small businesses which outsource lot of their processes in subcontract.


Main ideas

The main ideas are:● every planned activity is a project or part of a project● every single input signal towards the organization

belongs to a project or creates a new one● the organization itself is a project, thus its hierarchy

is a project hierarchy and its processes are project processes

● the main idea is to form an organization breakdown structure based on projects knowledge areas instead of the traditional departments and competence areas.


Workflow

The start of a project in such an organization is the moment when an opportunity has been identified, since an opportunity (or business case) is defines a need, request or idea. The project manager to whom the project was assigned covers all its aspects – he's responsible for putting the project through all its stages (initiation, planning, execution&control, closure).

All the project team members respond to him, so, someone that was a project manager on a different project could become on this project subordinate to the same person that was his subordinate on his project. The project management office acts as the coordinator in the resource distribution between different projects.


Simplified Workflow Flowchart


Project Management Information System


PMIS

A PMIS should cover all the processes, stages and knowledge areas of an organization, through the entire workflow: from the initial input to the final handover and project closure.

● it has to be able to get customized to follow our organization schemes

● it has to be scalable to be able to grow with us● it has to be under the control of our organization both, from

the user point of view and from the development point of view

A PMIS is more than just an ERP, since if we consider our “wide” organization (which includes all the organization stakeholders) as a project, we're talking about Organization Management Information System.


Thank You!

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project oriented work organization and felible hierarchy

Leadership & Management