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I am starting a project of going through the 6th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide and blogging about its contents.    The 6th Edition was released on September 22nd by the Project Management Institute, and the second chapter is a general introduction to the framework in which project management exists, starting with section 2.1 Project Influences.

Looking back on the first chapter, it contained the foundational elements of project management, showing in many cases the internal structure of a project.   The second chapter concentrates more on the exterior of a project, to the environments in which projects operate.  These environments can influence a project either favorably or negatively, and that is why a project manager needs to be aware of them.

In the past two posts, I discussed the two categories of project influences:

• Environmental Enterprise Factors (EEFs)–conditions not under control of the project team that influence the project; these can be internal and/or external to the organization
• Operational Process Assets (OPAs)–processes, policies, procedures, and knowledge bases that are specific to the organization

There is another form of influence on a project, and that is the governance framework of an organization.   Is an organization focused on operations, on projects, or something in between?    The type of organizational structure will influence many things on a project, such as

• project manager’s authority
• project manager’s role
• availability of resources
• management of the project budget
• administrative staff on the project (the project management team)

I think the Table on p. 47 of the various types of organizational structure is a bit confusing, so I’m going to go through the types of organizational structure type in a series of posts to make sure the person studying for the test understands the strengths and weaknesses of each type, at least from the standpoint of a project manager.

In the next posts, I will discuss functional (focused on operations), project-oriented (focused on projects), matrix (focused somewhere in between operations and projects), and some other additional types (hybrid, composite).

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