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Employees of my company are grouped into pools depending on technical skills (e.g. front-end devs, back-end devs, QA engineers, etc). For each pool there's a Tech Lead who doesn't manage projects (or people) but provides general technical directions to the company: he decides technical stacks, standard solutions, best practices and so on.

To initiate a project, the Head of Delivery selects a PM and staffs a team by taking technicians from the pools (depending on the requirements). The PM has full authority over his colleagues except for the technical decisions.

Is my company still a projectized organization or do the Tech Leads make it a matrix organization?

Thank you very much

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    What does it mean, the PM has full authority over his colleagues. Or: How is the line organisation? To whom are the colleagues talking if they want more money?
    – Tob
    Commented Nov 16, 2018 at 22:30
  • Does the full authority of the PM include the authority to hire/fire people from the company?
    – Bart van Ingen Schenau
    Commented Nov 17, 2018 at 9:32
  • Sorry for the misunderstanding, with "full authority" I simply meant that all activities in the company are managed by PMs. If a dev is involved in multiple teams at the same time, the relevant PMs agree on his schedule and refer to the Head of Delivery in case of schedule conflicts. We don't have a pure line organisation: for non-project issues, everybody refers to specific people/departments such as HR, Office Manager etc. E.g. hirings and firings are up to the General Manager
    – franz.fonta
    Commented Nov 17, 2018 at 16:16

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The classic definition of a matrix organization is:

A matrix organizational structure is a company structure in which the reporting relationships are set up as a grid, or matrix, rather than in the traditional hierarchy. In other words, employees have dual reporting relationships - generally to both a functional manager and a product manager.

(As Google reports from here. Wikipedia has a similar description.)

It's not clear (to me) from your description if the employees also report to the Tech Lead or only to the PM.

If they report to both then you are effectively a classic matrix organization.

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