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.