A project is running late, and the review reaches the usual conclusion: the project lead was not strong enough. Look more closely and a different picture often appears. The lead was accountable for the date and the budget, but the people doing the work reported to other managers, who moved them whenever customer work got busy. Changes to what the project was meant to deliver came from the owner and a key customer, and the lead could not decline them. Every purchase over a small limit needed someone else’s approval. The lead’s real levers were persuasion, sequencing and personal effort, and personal effort is the only one that grows with the size of the problem.
When a role regularly needs the person in it to work heroic hours just to cope with its ordinary demands, the problem is usually the design of the role, not the person. This article explains how the way a business organises people around projects changes what a project lead can actually control, how to close the gap between accountability and authority, and why allocating people to projects in fractions so often produces less capacity than the plan shows. It is general information for owners and managers who run projects alongside normal operations.
Three ways to organise people around projects
Most small businesses use one of three arrangements, often without choosing deliberately:
| Arrangement | How it works | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Functional | People stay in their departments; managers lend time to projects | Deep skills, consistent standards, efficient use of specialists | Slow cross-department decisions; projects compete with routine work |
| In between (matrix) | People report to their department manager; a project lead directs their project work | Combines skills with project focus | Two bosses; unclear who wins a conflict unless someone decides |
| Dedicated team | People are assigned to the project full time for a period | Fast, focused, clear authority | Specialists under-used between tasks; can drift from business standards |
None is best in general. The right choice depends on the work. A routine upgrade inside one department can run perfectly well within that department. A project crossing design, production, purchasing and customer service needs someone with authority to make trade-offs across them. A safety-critical project needs technical standards to stay firmly with the people who own them, even when speed matters.
What matters is not the label but whether the arrangement provides the decision rights, people and handoffs the project actually needs.
Accountability without authority
Making someone accountable does not give them authority. A useful check is to separate the authority a project lead needs into its parts:
- People: can they secure and keep the time of the people the work needs, or can that time be withdrawn without their agreement?
- Scope: can they decline a change to what the project is meant to deliver, or can others move the target while the accountability stays fixed?
- Money: can they approve spending within the budget they are accountable for?
- Technical standards: who owns design decisions and acceptance, and how does the lead get a quick answer?
- Standing: are they present when trade-offs between this project and other work are made, or are those decisions made elsewhere and passed down?
- Support: is there time and help for scheduling, purchasing, records and reporting, or does the lead do all of it alone?
Lack of authority over both people and scope is the critical combination. It describes a role accountable for a result it cannot materially influence, and no amount of talent overcomes it. The fix is either to give the lead more authority, or to make the limits explicit and hold them accountable only for what they can control. The decision rights before meetings article covers mapping who can decide what.
Stronger project authority is not always better, though. Giving a project full control can speed decisions but weaken technical standards, duplicate skills or disconnect the work from the people who will operate the result. Match authority to consequence: high-consequence technical decisions may need to stay with the owner of the standard, even when that is slower.
Escalate by type of decision, not just by dollar value
Many businesses set approval limits by amount alone. That misses decisions that are cheap but consequential, such as a small design change that affects safety or long-term maintenance, and treats some expensive decisions as risky when they are routine, such as a large purchase already within an approved plan. Define escalation by type as well as size: safety, customer commitments, scope, technical standards and money each have a named decision-maker and a threshold.
Fractions of people do not add up
The most common hidden problem in the “in between” arrangement is allocating people to projects in fractions. A plan says a drafter is 50% on the new product, a technician is 25% on the system upgrade, the purchasing officer is 20% on each of two projects. The fractions are added up and the plan shows enough capacity. Three misreadings make the plan wrong:
- Fractions are not additive. Three people at a third each are not one person. Each carries the overhead of an extra commitment, reloads context every time they switch, and waits in queues created by their other work. The more ways a person is split, the less each part delivers.
- A fraction is an intention, not availability. What someone actually spends on a project depends on who is pushing hardest that week. A 50% allocation is a claim on their attention, not a reservation of it.
- The rest is not free. Someone shown as 50% on a project is assumed to have 50% for other things. Usually much of that is already consumed by their normal role. Adding “just a small allocation” to someone already nearly full produces a person doing nothing well.
Practical rules help:
- List every commitment each person holds, including their normal role, not just project allocations. Count how many things each person is split across.
- Limit the splits, for example to no more than two projects per person alongside their normal role.
- Set a minimum allocation, such as a full day a week. Tiny slices rarely produce anything.
- Plan in uninterrupted blocks, not percentages. “Tuesdays and Thursdays on the project” is far more reliable than “40%”.
- Keep some time unallocated, so the first surprise does not delay everything at once.
- Name someone who can say no. In a small business this is usually the owner. Without someone with authority over the total, each request seems reasonable while the overall load becomes impossible.
The how much change a business can carry article covers finding the bottleneck people across all projects.
Teams that manage themselves still need boundaries
Some businesses give experienced teams wide freedom to organise their own work. That can improve speed and ownership where the work is well understood and people have the skills. But autonomy without design simply pushes ambiguity down. Self-managing teams still need:
- A clear purpose and outcome.
- Boundaries: which decisions are theirs and which are not, such as safety, pricing or customer commitments.
- Information to see the consequences of their choices.
- Measures that reward the whole business, not just their own area.
- A way to recognise when a decision is beyond their remit.
Treat it as bounded autonomy: start with discretion over familiar work, watch decision quality and escalation, and widen the boundary as evidence builds. The leader’s role shifts from directing tasks to setting context, removing obstacles and managing the team’s dealings with the rest of the business. The delegating without losing control article covers handing over responsibility in stages.
Someone must own the result after the project
One more authority gap appears at the end. A project team, especially a dedicated one, can deliver its output and disband before anyone in the permanent business has accepted responsibility for running it. The new process is live, but nobody owns its performance; the new product exists, but nobody is accountable for its sales or support. Name the person who will own the result after handover before delivery finishes, involve them in acceptance, and give them authority to refuse a handover that is not ready. A project lead can coordinate the transition, but lasting benefits need an owner who stays.
A worked example
This is an illustration. A 25-person metal fabrication business is developing a new range of modular products. The design engineer leads the project. The two drafters report to the drafting manager, workshop trials need the production manager’s schedule, and purchases go through the office manager.
On paper, each drafter is allocated 50% to the project: 19 hours a week each, or 38 hours combined, based on a 38-hour week. After two months the project is well behind. When the owner asks the drafters to log their time for two weeks, the project is actually getting about 14 hours a week between them. Each drafter holds four commitments: customer jobs, quoting support, a website update and the new product. Every urgent customer request interrupts project work, and every return to the project starts with half an hour of picking up where they left off.
The owner, as the person with authority over the total, makes five changes:
- Blocks, not percentages. Each drafter works on the project every Tuesday and Thursday, uninterrupted except for genuine emergencies. That is 2 days × 7.6 hours × 2 drafters = about 30 hours a week of focused time.
- Fewer splits. The website update is deferred, so each drafter holds three commitments, not four.
- Authority for the lead. The design engineer may decide design details and spend up to $15,000 on prototype materials without further approval. Changes to the product range itself go to the owner.
- Committed trial slots. The production manager books three workshop trial days in the schedule, which cannot be moved without the owner’s agreement.
- A clear line on standards. Welding procedures and load ratings stay with the production manager and the external engineer, and the design engineer gets a guaranteed answer within two working days.
Project time more than doubles without hiring anyone, and conflicts that previously reached the drafters as competing requests now reach the owner as decisions.
How this applies to a small Australian business
- Choose the arrangement deliberately for each significant project.
- Check the project lead’s authority over people, scope, money and standards.
- Hold leads accountable only for what they can control, or give them more control.
- Escalate by decision type, not only by amount.
- List every commitment each person holds, and limit the splits.
- Plan project time in blocks, not percentages.
- Name who can say no to new demands on shared people.
- Give self-managing teams clear boundaries and widen them with evidence.
Signals worth watching
- Project leads working long hours on coordination and chasing.
- People withdrawn from projects without the lead’s agreement.
- Targets changed by others while the lead remains accountable.
- Staff holding four or more commitments at once.
- Allocations that look complete on paper but produce little.
- Teams told they are empowered while managers quietly re-approve their decisions.
Common mistakes
- Blaming the project lead for problems the structure created.
- Assuming accountability brings authority.
- Adding up fractions of people as if they were whole.
- Giving projects total authority at the expense of standards.
- Declaring autonomy without boundaries or information.
- Leaving nobody with authority over the total load on shared people.
Frequently asked questions
Which structure suits a small business? Most use people from their normal roles, which is the “in between” arrangement. It works if someone resolves conflicts and time is allocated honestly. For large or urgent projects, a small dedicated team for a period can be worth the cost.
Should the owner lead projects personally? Sometimes, but the owner is often the bottleneck. It is usually better for the owner to hold the authority over priorities and trade-offs, and for someone else to lead the work day to day.
How do we stop customer work swallowing project time? Protect blocks of time, agree what counts as a genuine emergency, and make the owner the person who decides exceptions.
Is time logging necessary? A short period of logging is very useful to see what is really happening. It does not need to be permanent.
What if the project lead lacks the judgement for more authority? Then the issue is choice of lead or support, not structure. Give authority in stages as confidence grows.
Questions to ask
- What can our project lead decide alone, and what is decided over them?
- Can people be withdrawn from the project without the lead’s agreement?
- Who can change what the project delivers?
- How many commitments does each key person hold?
- Is project time planned in blocks or percentages?
- Who has authority to say no to more demands on shared people?
Bringing it together
How a business organises people around projects decides what a project lead can actually control. Choose the arrangement to suit the work, then check that the lead’s authority over people, scope, money and standards matches what they are accountable for. Escalate by type of decision as well as amount. Be honest about time: fractions of people do not add up, so limit splits, plan in uninterrupted blocks and name someone who can say no. Give self-managing teams real autonomy inside clear boundaries. A well-designed structure lets ordinary effort succeed, without needing heroics.
Source: KEVOS notes, drawing on teaching material on functional, matrix and projectised organisation structures, the project manager’s authority in each, self-managed teams and bounded autonomy, and an H. K. Craig (2004) trade column on the project management career. Examples and figures in this article are illustrations. This article is general information.
