How to improve project management

Summary form only given. At the present time new product development is one of the most important sources of competitive advantages for the company in the medium to long term. Nevertheless, innovatory projects cannot be efficiently managed without understanding the dynamic characteristics of their structure. The success of the implementation of an R&D project is determined by the management procedures applied to it. In fact, there are still many organizations, which suffer the disadvantages of developing their R&D projects by means of a functional team structure, which endangers the commercial success of the innovation. For this reason, other companies have constituted multidisciplinary groups made up of professionals from all the company departments, thus giving rise to the organizational formula known as matrix structure, which despite providing important theoretical advantages over the former structure tends to incline towards this functional structure, and so most matrix structures are only so on paper. In order to avoid this problem, other organizations have configured unified multifunctional teams which are highly committed to the objectives established for the project, in which they collaborate from beginning to end, and which are known as autonomous teams. In this way, it is possible to set up an informal control enabling any lack of fit to be rapidly identified, and the opportune corrective measures to be immediately applied and so it is possible to manage the innovative process without suffocating it.