In my current position, I work within a functional organization. From the lectures I can understand how the disadvantages come about however I have no run into an issue of having silos form between different groups. Every team has their own agenda but when it comes to completing a common task I have not run into any issues. Part of my job is to create engineering change requests which requires collaboration from multiple groups such as supplier quality, manufacturing, regulatory, and R&D. I have never come across an issue where the other functional groups were not willingly to help or non-compliant to the tasks assigned to them in the ECR. This is because divisional leads were always prompt in ensuring these metrics were being met. The one issue I was not too fond of was that functional heads of these tasks were rather removed from the individuals in the trenches of the project and there always seemed to be a knowledge gap in terms of what was being accomplished.
I do enjoy working in this environment, however at one of my previous internships I was based solely on a project based organization. Even though I enjoy the team and environment I work on now, I preferred the project based organization the most. This was because I was able to learn the most from the other members on my team. Working with such a cross functional group provides a gateway of experience into other fields that you normally would not have insight to. There would be a little bit more pressure on say for example the biologist on the team to be the subject matter expert in that field and not have many other resources to fall on. Overall, I preferred this organization structure due to how much I could learn in the younger stages of my career.

I work within a matrix organization, but as Dr. Simon mentioned in his lecture about his experience with a previous company, I would label it as a weak matrix organization. The reason I would call it a weak organization is because the communication between the project managers and functional managers is often lacking, causing the project team members to be pulled in many different directions, and leading to confusion on priorities. However, I also believe that if run correctly, the matrix organization can enhance the efficiency of projects. One of the biggest benefits I see is that by working with different team members on each project, everyone bring new ideas to the table and lessons learned from prior projects that they worked on, leading to innovative ways to run the project and solve problems that may occur. One con with this type of organization is what my company struggles with, lack of coordination between the project manager and functional manager, which can lead to project team members being severely overworked.

Currently I am working at a company that has traditionally been structured as a functional organization. Employees work on a project within a department, and report to the manager of that department. However, there is a very open environment and good communication between departments. In other words, if one department needs something from another department, they are quick to help each other out in order to meet business needs. This works well when projects are completed completely in house (or at least within the company's multiple New Jersey sites). More recently, I have been placed on a project team which has members from R&D, Quality, Regulatory, and Product Management all involved from division in three different countries. This structure resembles more of a matrix organization since the project manager is from a dedicated project management department, and the team members are pulled from various other departments to meet the project's resource needs. The biggest challenge with this was described by Dr. Simon in the lecture: Functional Managers and Project Managers are not always agreeing on how much time an employee spends on the project. It often ends in some kind of agreement between the two managers, but it has caused delays in our project. However, given that this is an international team, I do believe it is still best to be set up like a matrix organization in order to be successful.

In my recent experience I worked for both matrix and functional organization structures. I found that functional organizational structures much more efficient than matrix organization structure. I am not saying matrix structures do not work, but communication was very difficult. In some cases we had to set more meetings just to going over and explaining our work, and what is the next plan moving forward. I agree, transparency between departments is very beneficial no matter with what structure, but I think that’s the most difficult part. Communication was a lot difficult in a matrix organization structure.

As a scout we had a very functional organization. We worked in patrols, we had an assistant Patrol leader and a patrol leader. They got together with other leaders and executed decisions made be the senior patrol leader. I did like this method as a growing teen, I thought it was helpful to have such a clear cut way of "who's my boss?; who's his boss?". There were times at conventions and other organizations that we needed to act in a projectized manor and I think I preferred that more. I like the ability to talk to other branches and work to a common goal, not be blindly fallowing orders. I have not worked in a matrix setting and that might be why I find it confusing. I look forward to trying to out, but for my sake I hope I like it.

During a prior internship at a contract - based medical device manufacturing and assembly company, I experienced working under a functional organization. As a member of the new product development team, I worked alongside project engineers on the development and testing of documentations such as work instructions for manufacturing and quality inspections. Since the company was a small to medium sized enterprise, I personally felt that the organizational structure was able to operate in an efficient manner. Nonetheless, one con I experienced under this setup was working alongside the shipping department to get samples of assemblies to the customer prior to expected delivery dates. This con relates to a setback that occurred in which sample assemblies were not ready to be shipped by mail until after those in charge of outgoing mail had left for the day. Despite the members of my department staying late to ensure the completion of the assemblies for delivery, our functional manager had to communicate to the customer a delay in delivery time of the shipment. Overall, I believe that the size and scale of a company are factors that play an important impact on which organizational type will work best for a company.

I work in a small medical device company that uses a matrix organization. Although I have not been with the company for a long time, I can see the cons to a matrix organization. Because the company is small, individuals report to multiple supervisors and may be part of more than one project. This is an issue because the individual becomes overwhelmed with so many tasks to complete and as Dr. Simon mentioned in the lectures, scheduling conflicts arises. To try to prevent such issues, specific days would be blocked out for testing/validation tasks and there would be specific days blocked out for manufacturing of the product. An advantage of this type of organization is that the individual becomes knowledgeable of every aspect of the project. Those who have been part of the company for a longer time have some knowledge and expertise in tasks that may not be in their own department. Someone in the R&D would also be trained in QC tasks and may also be a part of the manufacturing process. Through this experience, I could see that there is not one organization type that would work for all companies. Factors like company size, resources, and the types of projects play into what organization type a company will decide on. 

The team I work on currently is a functional organization type. My department is very efficient when it comes to completing projects needed from our department. Communication is excellent across all individuals in our department. At times, individuals from the Supplier Quality department would reach out to our department with requests and tasks to supplement a project they may be working on. However, just recently I had to reach out to the R&D team regarding a task that required editing the Risk Management file. It was difficult trying to explain the request we had because of numerous reasons. One major reason was the miscommunication between both departments. Our team did not have the best knowledge regarding the editing process, and the R&D team had difficulty understanding the request being made. If we were in a project-based organization, I feel that such communication issues would not occur due to the knowledge transfer between individuals from each department on the project team.

I previously had an internship with an additive manufacturing company with a project-based organization. For this company, I believe it was the best option due to the size of the company. It was a very small company so a functional organization would have been challenging due to the small size of each department. I liked the organization of working within a project team. During my internship, it gave me a chance to see what type of work the other departments did and learn a much larger range of the various manufacturing tasks than I would have if I was working primarily within a department. As the company grows, I feel that it could be improved by using a matrix organization so that individuals are not always working with the same project teams. 

Upon graduating from college, my first professional job was working in a project-based organization.  I had one main boss, and a second leader who wanted to be both my boss and everyone else’s.  In hindsight, the two of them served as project managers for our group.  My boss was the main project manager.  The second leader was a min-project manager - mostly because of influence as a product expert.  There were 10 additional contributors for our team.  Our projects centered around customer implementations for one of the company’s 10 software applications.  Our small team allowed for knowledge transfers to happen seamlessly.  Our only problem was that we were inflexible in project cycle approaches.  We had so much success using the predictive life cycle model that we did not know when to use a different model.  We thought the predictive model would work when the company instructed our team to convert our core product from a DOS based operating system to Windows.  No one had experience with such a conversion, more less managing the project.  Unknowingly, we became a hybrid model, which was largely since we incorporated key customers as a part of a steering committee for the new product.  Company leadership and the customer steering committee could not agree on many topics.  My lesson learned from the experience is that success can cause short-sightedness for different projects, if you do not take time to properly initiate and plan.

Posted by: @srg36

I work within a matrix organization, but as Dr. Simon mentioned in his lecture about his experience with a previous company, I would label it as a weak matrix organization. The reason I would call it a weak organization is because the communication between the project managers and functional managers is often lacking, causing the project team members to be pulled in many different directions, and leading to confusion on priorities. However, I also believe that if run correctly, the matrix organization can enhance the efficiency of projects. One of the biggest benefits I see is that by working with different team members on each project, everyone bring new ideas to the table and lessons learned from prior projects that they worked on, leading to innovative ways to run the project and solve problems that may occur. One con with this type of organization is what my company struggles with, lack of coordination between the project manager and functional manager, which can lead to project team members being severely overworked.

As @srg36 mentioned, matrix organizations can enhance the efficiency of projects if run correctly. I believe the organization I work for falls into this category, but more so on the strong matrix side of things. Teams are selected by project managers from each department, and there can be multiple projects that run during the same period of time. I personally like this type of organization, knowledge usually transfers well between projects but you really have to be organized and focused.

@ps689 I also work for a company that utilizes a matrix organization structure. Things can pickup pace and be a bit confusing at times because of the multiple managers and projects. As you highlighted, scheduling conflicts can be a disadvantage because you can work on more than one project at once. Time management is important, so I've seen that planning ahead can make a big difference. I haven't been in my role long enough to notice too many other disadvantages but i'm sure it changes or can be different between industries.

I currently work for the public school system in Virginia. I work directly with a functional structure organization. In this functional structure, there are levels of command that make the decisions for everyone else. The salary, schedule, and resources are directed by the Superintendent and the School Board. The school system is divided into departments such as human resources and administration. This type of structure involves certain positions of power making the decision for faculty members (teachers, substitutes, librarians, and more). This functional structure describes the common structure of a company with a position of power that directs the needs of others. Each building in the district reflects its own individual functional structure, just on a smaller scale. My building principal passes along powers to all of the individuals working in the building. Then the Assistant Principals make sure to carry out the needs of the principal. There are some issues with the functional structure organization that could use some updates. I do find it problematic when the source of all power and decisions are left to one person. One person does not represent and address the needs of many in most cases. Having one superintendent can be detrimental because the needs of all teachers and students can not be fulfilled by one person. Each faculty member and student need different things to be successful. Most of the time that is too much for only one person to handle. In this case, the benefits do not outweigh the risks, and it should change in the future.