ABSTRACT
This chapter describes organizational factors that affect project success, their advantageous and adverse impacts and some possible counteracting adverse impacts, tradeoffs and possible courses of action for project managers who want to enhance the success of their projects. It outlines the six major organizational factors such as structure, staffing, client relations, attitude toward risk, communications, and expectations-that affect project success. Project managers can enhance their overall chance of success by understanding how organizations affect projects and by characterizing their own organizations. Project managers typically cannot have everything the way they would like. In order to obtain the advantages of reporting to a higher-level officer in the organization, they may have to forego the advantages of reporting to an intermediate- level officer or advantages that come with reporting to one who considers their work to be of highest priority. General managers can enhance the total success of projects by recognizing the different ways that organization affects projects and project managers.
