Table 3 includes main features of three project management organizational structures. The different characteristics would be used as supports to illustrates the influence in the project effectiveness in following parts.
1.1.1 Functional Organization
There are several main merits of this organizational structure on project effectiveness. First, utilizing the functional organization enables to enhance the knowledge creation, learning and sharing within the specific division. Grouping experts according to their skills offer them opportunities to further discuss the field of expertise (Meredith and Mantel, 2009). This assists in fostering more specialists and enhance their knowledge …show more content…
First, the project team might overlook customer’s expectation and the problem occurring, which lead to the extra time and money to complete projects. This could be explained by the fact that the project team members in this type of organization are selected by their skills and only required to perform specialized functions. They are driven by the completion of responsible activities instead of the client need or the occurring problem (Meredith and Mantel, 2009). Second, people do not have lots of opportunities to communicate with colleagues from different divisions (Lock, 2007; Meredith and Mantel, 2009). Lindstrom (2014) states as different stakeholders set different priorities, without an effective communication, projects need much more efforts to avoid failures. Therefore, in this organization, insufficiency in cross-functional communications might result in a longer time to response to the changes regarding the market and client demands or deliver the important message, which reduces the effectiveness. Third, in some cases, projects might suffer from the lack of leaders who can motivate and coordinate the team (Lock, 2007; Meredith and Mantel, 2009). Without the motivation and direction from leaders, the performance of employees might be