Commonly you shall see a lot of employees in an organization. These types of organizations are called functional organizations.

A functional organization is a traditional structure where the organization is divided based on the functions performed by that particular group of people, such as Human Resources, Information Technology, Marketing, Service, etc.

When a functional organization does a project, they usually assign an existing employee as a project manager.

The resource assigned as the “project manager” is usually a team member within a functional area and does not have the title of project manager. The functional manager will control the budget and the “project manager” will act more as a coordinator or expediter of project activities rather than having true project management responsibilities.

Resources for the project will need to be negotiated for with the functional managers and the accessibility of those resources will be based on business conditions. Any type of escalations of issues would need to be made to the functional manager.

Because the “project manager” has little to no authority, the project can take longer to complete than in other organizational structures and there is generally no recognized project management methodology or best practices. However, the depth of subject matter knowledge is much greater because the resources that will contribute to the project reside within the functional areas.

In Projectized Organizations like ATRC almost all of the organization’s resources are involved in project work and the project work is generally completed for the benefit of an external customer. The project manager has increased independence and authority and is a full-time member of a project organization and has project resources available to them, such as project coordinators, project schedulers, business analysts, and plan administrators.

The project manager has authority and control of the budget and any escalation of issues would be made to the sponsor and potentially the PMO leadership. Given that the project resources report into the project manager versus the functional area, there may be a decrease in the subject matter expertise of the team members.

This allows ATRC to provide an extremely high performance to price ratio when it comes to delivering extremely complex and expensive projects. This is achieved via the extreme efficiency built into our project, program and portfolio management processes.

A great example to explain this process is a movie. The investors are producers who provide resources to the project. All participants like actors, cameramen, stage workers, directors, and all others are hired only on a contract basis. The contracts are only for one movie which is a project.

This way hundreds of people which are mentioned in the credits of the movie come together to finish a great and high budget product and then go on to do other projects when the project is done.

This provides the most cost effective method to deliver products and services to customers.

If a long term maintenance contract is to be served, then it is managed separately. These renewed contracts can be though of as separate projects in a long running maintenance program.

ATRC does partner with the most popular, largest organizations in the respective fields of the projects to complete their projects.

Some of the ways work is done include the following :

Our companies hire independent contractors and freelancers.

We subcontract parts of our projects to other companies.

Other companies also subcontract specialized work to our companies.

We hire employees for long term contracts like tech support contracts.

This efficient and open approach allows ATRC to deliver large projects in the most resource efficient manner available with current technologies and management methods.