Leading Innovation Teams

The traditional view of projects in a matrixed organization is that the project manager draws all the required resources from the necessary departments to fully staff the project (figure 1).

But really a more accurate depiction of the project is one that depicts the responsibility gaps (figure 2). In figure two, each of the departments represent a fixed area of responsibility and the dotted circle represents the scope of the project. Note that the pink areas represent the gap between the department's and project's areas of concern.
Due to the differences in scope the project manager's see things differently (figure 3) than the department head's (figure 4).
To be successful the project manager needs to make sure that all the gaps are covered. The friction comes from the fact that in order to be successful department managers need to rigorously deliver on what is in their areas of concern. This means not wasting time and resources on ancillary issues.

The department managers, by definition, do not want to work on the gaps. The project managers, by definition, want to work on the gaps.
The answer is simple, but not easy. To close the gaps each of the department areas needs to voluntarily expand their areas of concern and therefore make the project gaps disappear.

The great project manager can get the department managers to increase their areas of responsibility without resorting to direct confrontation. Direct confrontation is a win-the-battle- lose-the-war type of problem for in the long run department managers have an infinite number of ways to sink a project manager

In order to close the gaps the project manager must create transparency; make it overtly obvious as to what needs to be done next. This requires a lot of effort on the program manager's part to create the feedback mechanism so that the data is factual. When presented with an inarguable gap the responsibility for action then shifts to the department managers.