Trapped in the Bermuda Triangle Among Project, Process, and Line Organizations: Accelerating Complex Tech Development Projects

This article describes an organizational development program deployed to stabilize and accelerate new product development projects in a high-tech industrial company. Initially, functional egoism, conflicts between project and line organizations, and inflexible processes frustrated the ambitions of all concerned. Within a year, many of these chronic issues were resolved using an approach aimed at clarifying the reason for action and promoting cross-functional collaboration among project and line organizations. Within the program, simple and hands-on solutions were developed that facilitated task execution and increased the transparency of project progress and fulfillment. A set of shared guiding principles was formulated, which served as a foundation on which to establish a robust and sustainable cooperative work culture. The new solutions significantly helped to deliver the next new product on budget and on time. We retrospectively evaluated the program using the Three-Pillar Model (abbreviated 3-P-Model; Wollmann et al., Three pillars of organization and leadership in disruptive times, Springer, Heidelberg, 2020).