- Australia Communications, Inc.
Australia Communications, Inc. (ACI), is a thirty-year-old, $350 million division of Communication Systems International, the world’s largest communications company. ACI employs about 340 people of whom more than 200 are engineers. Ever since the company founded thirty years ago, engineers have held every major position within the company, including president and vice president.
ACI, up until 2009, was a traditional organisation where everything flowed up and down. In 2009, ACI hired a major consulting firm to come in and train all of their personnel in project management. Because of the reluctance of the line managers to accept formalised project management, ACI adopted an informal, fragmented project management structure where the project managers had lots of responsibility but very little authority. The line managers were still running the show.
In 2012, ACI had grown to a point where the majority of their business base revolved around twelve large customers and thirty to forty small customers. The time had come to create a separate line organisation for project managers, where each individual could be shown a career path in the company and the company could benefit by creating a body of planners and managers dedicated to the completion of a project. The project management group was headed up by a vice president and included the following full-time personnel: