The Project Management Office Toolkit

Reporting Hierarchies and Responsibility Levels

Having defined the levels of project management, you must now determine how they interact. Specifically, what are the reporting relationships—who reports to whom—and who has primary responsibility for the various project management functions when two or more roles are present on a project?

Table 8-1 illustrates the reporting relationships among the various project management levels and that for the project team itself. ''R'' means that the role in the row normally reports to the role in the column. ''M'' means that the role in the row normally manages the role in the column. Hence, a project leader may report to a project manager or a project director, but not normally to a program manager. Similarly, ...