Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Putting It All Together

Multi-team projects are a phenomenon of the twenty-first century. As project management processes and practices become more pervasive in the enterprise, the likelihood of multi-team projects increases. Depending on their project management maturity levels, business units may have developed their own project management processes. When these come together in multi-team projects, management difficulties often arise. This chapter discussed those situations.

The literature is void of any suggestions as to how to manage these types of projects. With the exception of the three models discussed in this chapter, you will find very little else to help. The three models that I presented here are models that I have personally seen in use or recommended to my clients.

In this chapter, I discussed the following four factors that affect your choice of a best-fit project structure:

• Project management maturity — Either a PO or CT structure is recommended for organizations at Level 1 and 2 maturity, where business units have developed and firmly established their own project management methodologies. Organizations at Level 3 through 5 can use any structure with good results. These will comprise teams whose differences between methodologies will be minimal.
• Complexity and uncertainty — As complexity and uncertainty increase, the best-fit structure changes from PO to CT and finally to ST.
• Total team size — As team size increases, the best-fit structure changes from CT to ST ...