Impact of Organizational Structure on Schedule Management for R&D Projects

Abstract

Purpose: In this era of constantly changing environment, organizations are striving to devise strategies in order to meet the challenges of implementing right organizational structure and avoid project schedule delays to achieve projects‘ success. To attain project success in R&D public sector environment, the aspects of an organizational structure play a vital role in the successful implementation of R&D projects. Nevertheless, not meeting proposed timelines and inadequate management of schedules of R&D projects is the intrinsic hurdle in R&D projects. Originality: Unfortunately, classification of significant project success dimensions in R&D public sector environment is still an elusive concept. However, the study gauging the impact of organizational structure on the schedule management of R&D projects has never been discussed before. Moreover, various organizational design development tools have been proposed but no research has described the empirical value of link between organizational structure and schedule management variables. Methodology: This study adopted a multi-dimensional qualitative and quantitative approach to explore the critical dimensions of organizational structure and schedule management that enhance or hinder the project success in R&D public sector organizations. Semi-structured interviews followed by a Delphi study were conducted to explore various structural and project scheduling dimensions in addition to the findings of literature review. Through a survey of 285 responses in a public sector R&D environment, the proposed framework was validated by conducting face, content, construct, discriminant and convergent validity. However, this study also aims to gauge the effectiveness of organizational structure and schedule management dimensions upon each other by employing predictive modeling technique i.e., artificial neural network (ANN). The data was pre-processed; ANN model was trained and validated. Findings and Results: The results indicated that formalization, specialization, differentiation, coordination mechanism, decentralization and authority of managers has a significant effect on the schedule management and successful execution of R&D projects; whereas, centralization and departmentalization do not correlate strongly. The results also imply that decentralized organizational structures (organic) are more preferable than centralized structures (mechanistic) for the execution of R&D projects when proposed timelines are to be met timely. The proposed framework will act as a supporting mechanism for engineering managers to deal with organizational structure and schedule management factors in highly uncertain R&D environment where projects deviate frequently from their anticipated timeline.