As a project manager, what do you set as your career goal? Do you feel your organization is keeping you from your goal?  In this editorial, I’ll explore personal experience of an organizations objectives, its design and the impact is has on a project manager.

Back to the career goals of a project manager; do you want to be a manager of tasks or to be a leader of an organization to produce a desired result?  Do you see yourself assigned to a project with the responsibility of ensuring tasks are identified and completed on time and within budget?  Or are you enabled to not only create and manage a work breakdown structure and associated budgets, but to establish a team, incentivize the team, establish innovative solutions, identify and manage risk, control scope and keep stakeholders informed?  Organizations which are focused on innovation, growth and new product development must find leaders and allow project managers to lead.  Likewise, if the organization is focused on cost containment and reduced risk, then the organization should look for strong project task and budget managers, while centralizing leadership and risk taking activities into a traditional hierarchical structure.

Over the last couple of years, I have had the opportunity to work inside various organizational designs and with different project managers.  I have seen organizations which are focused on cost control and risk reduction burn out a project manager who wanted to be focused on innovation.  The result of the misalignment - the project manager was forced out of the position and the program which he was leading ended several years late and millions over budget.   Likewise, I have seen strong task and budget managers put into situations where they are asked to lead a new product development – again, burn out and what was deemed as project failure as the new product was late to market and short on innovative design.

A project manager who focuses on tasks tends to work on:

·         Tasks identification

·         Task completion status

·         Issue management relating to tasks

·         Risk identification

·         A project manager’s communications tend to be inwardly focused to the project team and outwardly focused to a centralized management team

A project manager who focuses on innovation:

·         Team composition

·         Team incentives

·         Innovation with respect to risk/reward of a solution

·         Encourage new procedures and processes

·         Communications responsibilities tend to be to all stakeholders including project team, peer management team members as well as external stakeholders such as customers of the end product, press members, etc.

An organization’s culture and design influences the types of experiences you will have as a project manager.  If the organization is highly matrixed and provides project managers with complete P&L responsibility of the project, you are more likely to gain exposure and experience in the innovation list mentioned above.  Whereas an organization that is hierarchical, requires project managers to be cost and task managers.  Organizational design, team incentives, decision making, and risk resolution tend to be centralized and pulled away from the project managers.

There is nothing inherently wrong with either type of organizational design.  Being a successful project manager means you need to understand the business objective and how you as the manager fit within the business organization.  Having experience in both types of organizations is very valuable, however as a project manager you should ensure that you understand your career objectives and make sure you align your goals with the type of organization that provides the opportunities you desire.