I put together and led a matrix maintenance organization for a little over
a year and a half. The purpose or intent was to provide a flexible
organization that met the needs of its client organizations without
burdening them with the administrative headache of maintaining redundant
or duplicate systems that didn't always work in concert.
We were phenomenomally successful and received an award for our work. As
Ken Marks put it:
> The essential characteristics of this approach is that an employee is
> responsible to two managers or two elements of the organization. The
> employee is assigned to a functional group that is responsible for the
> accomplishment of that function on whatever project it might be needed.
I found this definition to be the exact nature of successful matrix
organizations. I have looked at a few, especially those that were not
working. I believe that matrix prganizations work best when they are
conceived and executed based on specific functions. Ours was maintenance.
When you try to make a multipurpose organization work in a matrix
situation, you overload the structure and, essentially, doom the effort to
failure. Establishing a matrix organization based on function or
project-specific needs, the demands are much less and much easier to
manage/coordinate. This context is often a temporary one but can be a
much longer-term arrangement (such as our standing maintenance
organization). The problem with a longer-term arangement is that the
people involved may have trouble handling the sustained pace and pressures
associated with achieving results that please so many different masters.
We were very successful because we focused on the needs of our clients and
finding ways to more efficiently and effectively meet those needs in an
ever-changing environment. After a time the people who did this needed a
break. We built such a break into the system but found that this effort
was a temporary fix at best. Various people could handle the stresses
better than others, but all eventually needed a rotation into a
less-stressful environment.
--Clyde Howell orgpsych@augusta.net
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>