Getting matrix organisations right

I love matrix organisations. I love seeing them done well and I take secret pleasure at seeing a group of intelligent people in an organisation occasionally tie themselves in knots with them.

The secrets to getting them right are pretty basic.

Firstly don’t use a matrix structure unless you need to. A more traditional command and control hierarchy will quite happily run many operations in a business. The level of fluidity in the day to day work of team members is the main differentiator between hierarchical and matrix. You can build the pyramids with command and control (I have 7.5 million tonnes of evidence if you care to go to Cairo with me) but you can’t juggle myriads of projects effectively in the same way.

Okay choose well – that was a pretty easy point to mention right?

The rest of the key points are about role clarity. It’s where you get a mixture of roles that conflict will tend to occur. This is maybe best explained with an example.

Resource managers are meant to ‘keep a roof over the heads’ of the staff they look after – keep them fed, happy, paid and maybe even developed if we’re feeling ambitious.

Project managers are put in place to direct a unique process that will only be carried out once. They draw on resources from different resource groups to carry out tasks to get the project done.

Easy isn’t it? Well actually a common mistake organisations make is in trying to ask people to be other resource and project managers. With the best will in the world it is a very tricky compromise. As a resource manager, the role is to help project managers put together their teams and achieve their objectives. As a project manager, the objectives of the resource manager’s own project may conflict completely with other projects. A key resource may be needed to prevent a crisis in another project but not freed up because the combined project/resource manager is watching their own back. This ‘selfish’ behaviour is why you need to avoid resource managers being project managers if you can possibly avoid it.

Now I’m a big boy and know you can’t always do this. My world is about getting results in tricky situations – not living with the ideal. So when you are forced to deal with individuals fulfilling the combined project and resource management roles, you may need to oversee the resource decision making in the affected group – possibly appointing someone else to do the resource allocation for the duration of the role conflict.

© Copyright 2005 Richard A D Jones