Your organisational structure can help or hurt project success
To a lesser degree, your organisational structure can get in the way of, or help support, the overall success of your projects. I say that this is a lesser problem because, to a certain extent, you can change your organisational structure. In fact, you can change the organisation chart frequently, and some companies do just that. Culture, on the other hand, is not easily changed. It can take years for a large organisation to develop a culture of excellence (although it doesn't take nearly as long to fall back into mediocrity). Some organisational structures can definitely impair your ability to deliver projects. First are those organisations whose project teams are doing support work. If your project organisation does support as well, it usually means that support issues will pop up and take the focus away from the project. A lot of multitasking and thrashing takes place as you move from support work to project work to support work. It's usually very difficult to prepare good estimates and meet your scheduling commitments. You may be forced into this structure if your staff is small. In the last company I worked at, for instance, we had 15 people who worked on support, projects, and enhancements. However, we didn't have enough people to specialise in either support or project work. This made it difficult to meet all of our project commitments. Instead, we had to do a good job of managing expectations. Your organisational structure may also impede the ability to share resources. For instance, if your project team needs a resource with a specific expertise, you may not be able to easily share that person with another functional area. Some of this is also related to your culture. Ask yourself whether a different organisational structure would help. If it would, you may have an organisation problem. If it wouldn't help, your culture is probably not supportive of resource sharing. When I worked for a beverage company, for instance, we went through a period of two years when the management team developed a strong culture of resource sharing between projects. However, with the arrival of a new CIO and new director, resource sharing was discouraged (and punished). So, the culture quickly reverted to resource hoarding. Step back and see the big picture
A number of organisational factors support or inhibit the ability of your project managers to be successful. Granted, culture is a broad term, but your organisational culture plays the biggest role in whether you're able to deliver projects successfully. You can't attack a culture of mediocrity (or a culture of failure) one project at a time. You need to address it in a broad and multifaceted way. Your organisational structure can also help or hinder your success rate. The structure can determine how well you focus on projects and how easy it is to share resources between organisations. If you attack the broader cultural problems, you'll have a positive effect on many of the organisational barriers to success as well.