ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter we dealt with some of the major management-structure decisions which must be made by a large, advanced-technology organization that seeks both to maintain a strong research base and to guide the imple mentation of complex development programs. We wish to continue looking at structure by moving from those loftier issues of top-management design to the structuring of indi vidual projects. □ It is clearly unrealistic in any but the smallest projects to conceive of neatly autonomous project groups containing all the necessary manpower, skills, and physical resources. As we have noted frequently, advanced technologies usually require the collaboration of outside organizations (which we have subsumed under the generic title of contractor). In addition, both within the sponsor’s own organization and each of the contractor’s organizations there are a multi plicity of divisions and subdivisions, each possessing their own unique expertise and having some function to perform in the total project. □ All these units will have to evolve reasonably predictable, routine ways of dealing with one another if the hundreds of thousands of questions that come up are to have any chance of being answered. (The point has been made before, but is worth making again, that a painful characteristic of these technologies is the number of unknowns and unanticipated problems.) There is going to have to be rather a great deal of contact among these various units both within and among the many organizations that make up the total federation. □ In examining the structure of individual projects, we shall move from the more static to the more dynamic administra tive patterns. At the outset the sponsor’s top management, with or without the collaboration of the project manager, probably makes some tentative decisions about the size and comprehensiveness of the project staff as compared to the nonprojectized or functional or line staff. Similar, but not necessarily parallel, decisions will have to be made by the various contractors who are going to be part of the project. Even these decisions do not fully determine the relationship
of the project office to each of the functional groups, and that is also a choice we shall wish to examine. □ At a more dynamic level, once the external form of the project has been decided, a viable pattern of communica tion and coordination that keeps the parts functioning in concert must still be evolved. Three distinct patterns or styles are observable: integration, dispersion, and redun dancy. Interestingly, and perhaps paradoxically, these rep resent almost directly opposite or mutually contradictory techniques, and yet they frequently are used simultaneously and in a mutually supporting fashion.
