Project Organogram / Project Organization Hierarchy in ZilicusPM Project Management Software

This post illustrates the essence of the unique feature offered by ZilicusPM – Project Organization Hierarchy also known as “Project Organogram”

We will cover:

• What does the term Project Organization Hierarchy/ organogram mean?
• What is the purpose project organogram?
• What are its benefits of project organogram?
• What can be potential/future development wrt organogram?

Organogram / Project organization hieararchy:

An organogram or organizational chart is a diagrammatic representation of the structure of an organization and the relative association or relationship among different positions or ranks within it.
By and large, for a given company an organogram shows the relation/ association between people with different positions/roles. It can be relationship between manager and sub-ordinates, departmental heads to managers, company executive to various departmental heads. For larger organisations, the organogram becomes quite large hence it is generally advisable to spit it into sub-organograms separately created for each department.

Types of Organogram:

There are primarily three types of organization charts:

• Hierarchical (shown below)
• Flat Organization Structure (Everybody reports to one manager/CEO)
• Matrix (Dual Reporting | Departmental & Functional )

The hierarchical organization structure is the most commonly observed in many companies, though large sized companies have matrix type of organization structure. Whereas the flat type of organization structure is not so common and can be seen in very small size companies attributed to its obvious limitation of manageability.

Purpose of Organogram in ZilicusPM:

As mentioned above, each company has formal or informal organization hierarchy in place. In ZilicusPM project management software, we let customer replicate his/her project organization hierarchy to reflect projects’ access & privileges.
It can be explained better with an example (hypothetical though):

1. A company has a CEO who has two departmental heads (DH1, DH2) reporting to him
2. One of these department heads (DH1), who has two project portfolio managers (PPM1, PPM2) reporting to him
3. One of these project portfolio managers (PPM1) has four project managers reporting to him. (PM1, PM2,…, PM4)
4. PM1 is managing projects Proj 1 and Proj 2 where.as PM4 is responsible for Proj 3 & Proj 4

ZilicusPM – can help this customer build project organization hierarchy by making PM1 reports to PPM1, PM2 Reports To PPM1, …, PPM1 Reports To DH1 … and DH1 Reports To CEO. (For the resource above PM level, when they are added to given organization, they can be assigned with role as Portfolio Manager through administrator tab in ZilicusPM)

Such type of reporting hierarchy along with specified roles assigned users ensure access & privileges to given project for a given resource/team member.

Benefits

• The project created by PM1, can be viewed by PPM1 but not PPM2, PPM3 nor PPM4
• Projects created by PM2 are viewable to PPM1 as well as CEO but not DH2
• Similarly projects created by PM1, are not accessible to PM2, PM3 and PM4
• Project ‘Proj1’ created by PM1 can be viewed by PM2 only if he is added as a team member to ‘Proj1’. In this case, PM2 cannot add/modify project schedule he can update tasks assigned to him in this project. He is just like any other team member in ‘Proj1’
• To view project health of ‘Proj1’ , DH & CEO need not be added as a team member to Proj1. Their access to Proj1 is implicit through this organogram
• Thus for Proj 1, PM1 & its managers (all up to CEO) can have access to project’s workspace be it project dashboard, schedule, documents, issues & risks. PPM1 & higher up management will implicitly be able to view the project portfolio dashboard (it is different from project dashboard). This portfolio dashboard gives one stop view of health of all active projects in the portfolio of given portfolio manager(s).
• Most importantly, for every new project created, you don’t need to keep on adding portfolio managers as team members to the project; they will be implicitly given access to the project based on the project organization and roles assigned
• Essentially, you can add organizational access and privileges based on an organization hierarchy of your company. The complexity of managing project is also attributed to difficulty in figuring out & managing access level and privileges. This complexity gets multi-fold when there is apparent mismatch between a given person’s role in organization & role defined in the system. This is where ZilicusPM becomes quite useful & handy for an organization which has multiple projects running simultaneously. You can simply replicate your organization natural reporting hierarchy into ZilicusPM that will synchronize it with project’s access level & privileges.

As a project manager you only need to add project team members individually who are actually going to work on it. ZilicusPM lets you have the flexibility of selecting team members where given team members may or may not report to a given project manager.

ZilicusPM Is a Complete Project Management Software For Your Team. Get Started Now!

About Zilicus

Zilicus offers the best project portfolio management tool ZilicusPM, with robust project management tools capabilities and easy ways to track project management KPI,

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