What is a balanced matrix organization?

Matrix management organizations are difficult to manage properly. One of the difficulties in matrix management is balancing the level of authority between the functional manager and the project manager. If the project manager has too much authority, too many of the people in the functional organization will be taken from that organization and assigned improperly to the projects. If the functional manager has too much authority, the organization essentially stays a functional organization and never becomes a matrix management organization.

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If the functional manager is able to dominate the project manager, the organization will remain much as it was when it was a functional organization. The project managers will have to request work from the functional managers, and all the work will be done in the functional organization under the direction of the functional manager. The people will all receive their work assignments from the functional manager, and work will be scheduled and performance will be measured by the functional manager. The project manager will merely advise the functional manager as to what work should be done.

If the project manager is able to become more powerful than the functional manager, the project managers will take control of the functional organization by forcing all work to be done in the projects. This means that the project managers will not allow any of the project work to be done in the functional departments. If no work is being done in the functional areas, the project managers will control all the people doing the work.

In this situation the project managers also become responsible for people's other project assignments. Since the people working are all working for project managers and no one is working in the functional areas, project managers will have to meet with each other to have people assigned to do work on their projects.

Balancing the organization is really less difficult than it might seem. The most effective way is to look at the length of each person's assignments. If a person is going to be assigned to work on a project for the next four weeks, let us say, we move that person to the project team's location, and the person stays there working for the next four weeks. If a person is required to do work that is expected to take less than four weeks, the project manager writes a work authorization to the functional department, and the person works in the functional department.

Some work needs to be done in the functional department so that there is work to do in that department when people are waiting for their next project assignment. If we find that the functional department has very few people working in it, it may be that the project managers are drawing too many people into the project organization. Investigation will likely show that some of the people working on the project in the project team location are being underutilized.