Projectized or project-based organizations

Just as the name of these organizations suggests, it is projects all day, every day. This type of organizational dynamic is the best for project managers for many reasons, but it is difficult for organizations to attain unless they were set up that way from the beginning. Many large organizations, such as Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, could be considered project-based organizations because there are so many products, services, and processes happening all the time. It would be impossible to produce all of that in a functional environment.

Some of the key aspects of project-based organizations include the following:

• Most, if not all, of the team is co-located.
• The project manager has full authority.
• Support staff reports to the project manager, including borrowed resources as needed.
• The core project team doesn't report to anyone else, so their loyalty is to the project manager and the project.
• Often, the core team is released after the project ends to work on other projects. This means they may not totally belong to the project manager on every single project. The downside to that could be that the team members don't actually have a home department they return to after projects end.
• Most have a PMO and could also have a change-control board (CCB) whose job it is to approve or deny change requests.

In Figure 2.5, the project-based organization is shown and is considered the very best dynamic for project managers, however it is difficult for organizations to create if they were set up in a different dynamic originally:

Were you able to identify your type of organization from the descriptions? Sometimes people see aspects of all of these in their current organization. This could be considered a composite organization, which is a combination of two or more organizational structures. This can be done for simplicity on a project or because the organization itself runs different projects with different needs.

Because you will get questions on the different dynamics and be asked to recognize them in situational questions, the following is a quick reference of the three major types you could see on your exams: