“Can you park that for a week? I need you on something else.”
Said by a line manager, to a member of a project team, about a task on the critical path. The project manager finds out on Friday, at the progress meeting, when the task is still at zero.
Nobody did anything wrong, as far as the org chart is concerned. That is the problem.
Every company has a line organization. Departments, managers, reporting lines, appraisals. It is more or less fixed, at least until the next reorganization. A project organization is something else. It is temporary, it is set up for one specific objective, and it is dissolved again when that objective has been delivered.
Most companies draw a project organization chart. It sits in the project plan, neatly boxed. Very few actually follow it. And some do not see the difference at all. They take the project manager and the project team and shoehorn them into the line organization chart, as if the project were just another department.
The National Team
Think of a national football team before a World Cup.
The players all work somewhere else. They are employed by their clubs, trained by their clubs, and paid by their clubs. For a few weeks, they are released to the national coach. During those weeks, the national coach picks the team, decides who plays where, and answers to the national federation for the result. Nobody else.
Nobody expects the club manager of the left back to phone him at half-time with tactical instructions. Nobody expects the national coach to report to the manager of the club that supplied the goalkeeper. It would be absurd, and every fan in the stadium would see it.
In a project, it is Tuesday.
Most project managers have a line manager, like everybody else in the company. Nothing wrong with that. The trouble starts when the project is drawn into the line organization chart, and the project manager starts reporting on the project to that line manager. For the duration of the project, a project manager reports to the project’s Steering Committee, and only to the Steering Committee, as the governance model in the project plan should state.
The confusion does not stop with the project manager. Team members who are supposed to take direction from the project manager now also take direction from line managers who carry no responsibility for the project at all. It is not unusual for one team member to receive two different instructions about the same piece of work, from two different managers, in the same week.
Picture two coaches on the touchline, both shouting at the same left back. One is the national coach, who wants him to push forward. The other is his club manager, who wants him to take it easy, because there is an important league game on Saturday.
One Coach per Team
So, to be clear. For all project staff and all project activities, the temporary project organization supersedes the line organization, for the duration of the project.
Read that sentence again. If there is one mistake organizations keep making on projects of every size, it is ignoring it.
That does not make the line manager irrelevant. The club still pays the salary, looks after the player’s career, and gets him back after the tournament. The line manager still owns the appraisal, the training plan, and the person’s long-term development. What the line manager does not own is the project work.
A few things make the rule stick:
Agree up front, in writing, which people are released to the project, for how much of their time, and for how long. Football federations agree release dates long before the tournament starts. Projects can manage the same.
Put the line managers who supply the people on the Steering Committee, in the senior supplier role. If they want a say in how their people are used, that is the table to say it at. Not the corridor.
Show the project organization chart to the whole team, not just to the people who read the project plan. Everybody should know whose instruction counts on project work.
When a line manager does need somebody back, the request goes to the project manager, and if it changes time, cost, or scope, it goes to the Steering Committee.
When the tournament is over, the players go back to their clubs, and nobody finds that strange either. The national team is dissolved until the next time it is needed. The project organization should work exactly the same way.
Until then, there is one coach per team.
Otherwise the left back, with two coaches shouting at him, does what most project staff do in that situation.
He listens to the one who pays his salary.