Currently, I work for a company that employs the functional organization structure. This helps in allowing all the smaller specialized groups to focus on our certain tasks at any specific point of a project. For instance, in R&D I’m solely engrossed in working and developing any direct engineering work for said project. What I mean by this is, I have no input from regulatory or quality, till after everything is said and done and they come back with input. There are disadvantages to this due to the lack in flexibility at times and lack of crossover between groups, until signatures are needed unfortunately. This is possibly to increase the speed and workflow since all of the specialized workgroups are in departments together and are able to pool all their resources on that specific task at hand.
-Tarek