ORGANIZATION IN A NUTSHELL

Knowledge management systems should be organized according to your company type (product and service companies) and organization structure (functional, matrix, projectized, composite).

It is important to understand which kind of organization you are part of in order to identify main section of knowledge management system and develop and implement an appropriate strategy for it. For this reason it is fundamental to present some terminology to describe different part of organization.

ORGANIZATION TYPE

Product companies deliver significant new value to the business by creating innovative products. The product is built prior to client requests and same product is used by multiple customers. And also a product company primarily focuses on getting benefits solely by selling product (examples Microsoft office, ERP software).

Each product should have a product manager that act as CEO of the product. In particular they create product roadmap (strategic product-planning tool that shows how the product is likely to grow across several major releases) input for product backlog that define set of new features and fixes that will be present in the next product release.

Service companies delivers software or service through several projects after a customer requests for it providing them same value. The service is usually for a specific client and not duplicated for others. Service companies usually makes revenue by providing services like outsourced development, testing or consulting over a finite period and the manpower is billed to the client over this period.

Both product and service companies have a portfolio of services/products with different growth rates and market share defined by upper management

The product/service portfolio is the core repository for all information for all product/services in an organization. Each product/service is listed along with its current status and history.

The Product/Service Portfolio consists of three parts:

-         Product/Service Pipeline: product/services that are not yet sold/live. They may be proposed, or under development

-         Product/Service Catalogue: active product/services

-         Retired Services/ Product: Product/Services in the process of being discontinued, before they are finally decommissioned

In order to deliver one or more product to specific customer several projects are performed involving different stakeholders (customer, users, employee in the company with specific skills) coordinated by a project manager. Project manager determine what needs to be done, who is going to do it, and when it needs to be done and control project status till all deliverables are approved by customers.

After go live and pilot phase operation managers make sure that IT services are delivered effectively and efficiently, fulfilling user requests, resolving service failures, fixing problems, as well as carrying out routine operational task.

Even though product and service companies are different from a knowledge management system point of view each service can be viewed as a “unique” set of products delivered to a particular customer.

Each product consists of a set of different components and it can be described from different perspectives (Business, Information Systems Application and Data, Technology).

ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE

Organization structure can be of 4 types:

Functional organizations

Functional organizations is a hierarchical organization where each employee has one clear superior, and staff are grouped by areas of specialization (departments) and managed by a person with expertise in that area (Functional Manager).

In this kind of organization Project Manager has very little role or no authority while Functional Manager has full management role and authority

The functional organizational approach does not create a formal project team. Rather, the business management determines a project is needed and then each functional department does their portion of the project in an isolated fashion.

Projectized organization

In projectized organization the resources are dedicated to projects and reports only to the project manager. Project managers have the complete authority over the project and project team. They are fully authorized to take decisions regarding the project and acquiring and assigning resources.

Matrix Organization

In a matrix management structure, the project manager assign project tasks to the team members, irrespective of department they belong to.

Functional Managers run and manages resources in those departments. Resources report to one functional manager and to one or more project manager depending on how many project are working at one time. Functional manager is primarily responsible for the administrative part and allocate resources to projects and project manager is responsible for the end to end execution part of the project.

Both the managers share the responsibility of performance reviews for the employees reporting to them. In case of resource requirement, the project managers need to negotiate with the functional managers of the respective functions.

Composite Organization

Composite Organization involves all of the previous structures at various levels. For example, even fundamentally functional organizations may create a special project team to handle a critical project.

In these table are presented project characteristics for each organization type