In the traditional view, the primary model for organizations is a rigid structure where the reporting relationships are authoritarian. Today, organizations are using this industrial-era model less and less. A new paradigm, one where fluid relationships between customers, suppliers, workflow and staff, supplants the brittle organization chart. So, we now hold a concept of business where the organization is not a static structure, but instead is the congregation of operational processes. The need to respond to rapid changes in the competitive sphere is clear.
Organisms react, grow, move, pass through phases and interact.
The fluidity and flexibility of this view of business is unsettling, particularly to those who have grown up in the traditional organization. This is a watershed in management, just as breakthroughs in physics at the turn of the century made obsolete most prior knowledge, or modified it fundamentally. Organization as Background, Projects as Foreground Historically, the organization formed the fixed background on which the business' foreground activities were orchestrated. These activities are projects, with the definition of project ranging from a two hour planning session with two attendees, to the planning, design and manufacturing of the Boeing 777, involving thousands of staff and hundreds of firms over a multi decade timeframe. Although once the sole province of titled managers, many non-managers are increasingly involved in the planning, analysis and tracking of projects.