A contingency approach to designing project organizations: theory and tools

Abstract

Many firms have increasingly come to rely on projects as a fundamental approach to organizing work. Yet understanding the best way to organize projects is a challenge, given the various contingencies that impact project success. We focus here on three contingency-based project organization design tools (the design structure matrix, OrgCon™ and SimVision™) that help to manage project complexity and ensure project success by identifying misfits or misalignments between organizational elements. We discuss the application of these models to a large National Aeronautics and Space Administration project as an example. We conclude with a consideration of how the existing tools are useful, and where they fall short.

Keywords:

• Contingency
• organization design
• project management

Notes

The Obama administration cancelled Project Constellation in October 2010. However, the project organization design challenges detailed here remain for NASA in its development of new projects.

For details on DSM and its application see: http://www.dsmweb.org.

Further description of the OrgCon™ is available at: http://www.ecomerc.com.

SimVision™ is the commercial version of VDT—the virtual design team. See: http://www.epm.cc.