 The influence of both the project manager and those stakeholders is determined a lot by the organizational structure in which we are working. PMI identifies a number of organizational structures going from the functional organization all the way to the projectized organization. In between, we have matrix organizations, weak matrix, balanced matrix, and strong matrix. As you can see from the illustration on the bottom of the slide, the project manager authority increases as we move toward the strong matrix or projectized organization and the functional manager authority diminishes. Likewise, as we move toward the functional organization, the project manager authority diminishes and the functional manager authority becomes more dominant. A functional organization is what we might traditionally think of as a company structure or organizational structure where we have functional managers that manage their individual departments organized by function and have control over the hiring, firing of their staff, the promotion of their staff, and the various job duties or tasks that their staff is carrying out. These managers then report to C-level executives at the top of our organization. The project manager, and I put this in quotes because at this level sometimes the project manager really doesn't have a lot of managerial authority to conduct the project, but they're going to have to coordinate with all the functional managers to get staff assigned to their project in order for it to be successful. These folks may in fact be called something other than project managers, they may be project coordinators, project expeditors, project schedulers. On the other end, in an entirely projectized organization, we have organizations that are oriented entirely toward projects and not functional units. So in this case, the project manager has the authority over staff, hiring, firing, assignment of duties, etc. There may be a functional manager involved, often involved for training and organizational purposes, but often does not have the type of authority over staff that we would see in a functional organization. In between we have the matrix organization, and within that we have three types of matrices, a weak matrix, balanced matrix, and strong matrix. We started at the weak matrix. We have here the functional managers and staff members that are assigned to various projects, and those staff members are mainly reporting to their functional manager, but the project manager has more authority to actually determine what staff is doing on their project throughout the course of that project. Once again, the project manager may not be given that title, but may be referred to more as the project coordinator or project expeditor. In the balanced matrix, as you can imagine, we have a sharing of responsibility between the project manager and the functional manager for assignment of staff and the tasks that they're working on. This can work very well and is sometimes considered an optimal type of organization. However, we must have a lot of coordination between our project manager and functional manager, a lot of cooperation and communication about priorities. We also must have a lot of support from our C-level executives, and staff may sometimes have to deal with the fact that they have two bosses to report to instead of just one. In a strong matrix, we see the project manager as having a much greater role in the assignment of staff to different projects and duties, and once those staff are assigned, being able to control and make sure that they are working on the aspects of the project that they need to be working on, all these project managers may in fact be coordinated by some sort of project management office as well. Now, why do we care about project management structures? There's actually been quite a lot of research done on this, and the research has found that if you are involved in projects, having an organizational structure where the project manager is more dominant makes it more likely that you're going to bring your project in on time and on schedule. Okay, so functional organizations, while they're great for daily operations, are not so great with projects. Same thing if you go toward a strong matrix or a projectized organization, they are very good with projects, maybe not so great with ongoing operations. So we really have to kind of find that balance between projects and operations within our organization. Now, looking at this, some folks have decided that instead of changing their functional organization toward a matrix or a projectized organization, which has been done by several companies, and there's numerous case studies about those particular transitions, some functional organizations have done something in order to get some of the benefits of a projectized organization without having to change their entire organizational structure. One of the things that they've done is produce a dedicated project team. So in this case, we still leave our functional organization in place, but what we're going to do is we're going to pull off staff and have them report directly to a project manager. So these staff may in fact be located in a separate building or a separate area away from their normal cubicle and their normal functional managers, and may be devoted entirely to a special project for a number of years. Probably the classic case study on this was with Apple computers when Steve Jobs led a project team to create the Macintosh. That case study also illustrated some of the problems with a project team. For example, some of the us versus them mentality that can set in, the folks that are working on the project team may feel that they're special in doing something that is really the future of the company and the organizational folks are not, and the organizational folks may feel that, well, they're the ones that are bringing in the money that supports the new and interesting projects, and so there can be some conflict there. There's also some conflict when we have to bring those staff back into the organization, so that needs to be thought through in advance. Once they're going to be a place for them, how are we going to integrate them back into our functional organization? Once again, if you look at some of the studies that have been done, find that by using a project team, a functional organization, while they may be largely unsuccessful in conducting projects, if they did it within their current organizational structure, by using a project team, they can get some of the same benefits that is experienced by an organization that is organized as a projectized organization or strong matrix. So, several different aspects controlling costs and technical performance. So, that hopefully gives you a good overview of these different organizational types and the roles, as well as why they're important.