'Matrix' style management

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Perhaps some of you have heard of this. It seems to have become more commonplace in corporations over the last 10 years. Anyhow, the matrix management style eliminates the traditional report structure and assigns various individuals to projects. One way or the other, everyone is supposed to rally around and do what is needed.

I have been in these situations and it seems to have a down side, namely, you get numerous individuals coming to you and asking for things. Often they conflict, or you don't have time for both. Of course, under this setup, you are not really supposed to have a boss, but you do in effect end up having several. This is grating, I suspect, to AS sensibilities.

The downside to the old system is that if your one official boss is an ass, it is hell. OTOH, if you and he had a good rapport, then you were shielded from alot of potentially distracting activities.

Do any of you have similar experience? Thoughts?

After 20 years in the working world, I can tell you they have 'fashions'. Team Building, QA, 7 habits of whatever... whatever this is, in a few years someone will have some new 'killer' theory to make a zillion out of, and everything changes again.

I used to work in a matrix-managed department (this meant that even though I had one main supervisor, I was expected to work on behalf of several other employees, who are similar to project managers. They did the "consultancy" work and I did the actual technical work, which is what I am best at). The advantages of this is that it broadens your horizons, and adds more variety to your role, but the disadvantage is that it can mean you have to deal with conflicting demands, ie you feel that you are being pulled about in a "tug of war".

Even though I'm quite good at time-management when I'm at work, even I began to struggle when the team's workload became extra heavy. This led to a situation in the middle of 2006 when I began to feel overloaded at work. To make it worse, my desktop computer wasn't powerful enough to do what I needed to do (I had to work on massive Excel spreadsheets, creating complex formulae), and on a couple of occasions I lost work due to crashes. The crashes were caused by the files becoming too big. This delayed me on getting started on other work. Then I had to justify to my other project managers why I can't get started on *their* work yet. Then they have to explain the situation to the "stakeholders" of the project, who are usually based in other departments.

Fortunately, that difficult period didn't last more than a couple of months or so. I mentioned to my main supervisor that I felt as though I was being put under too much pressure by one of the project managers and that I felt that this meant I couldn't dedicate enough time to my other work, and she arranged for his manager to speak to him about it, to make sure he was aware that he was overloading me. After that, he was more tolerant and he gave me more time to do things, so that I would have enough time for my other work.

Apart from this, I thought that matrix management was good as it meant my workload was more varied and I could learn from different people and gain different perspectives on things.