BUS603: Managing People

In executing humanitarian projects, providing speedy, timely and effective interventions is the core objective of all NGOs operating in countries affected by crisis or poor economic conditions. In Lebanon, NGOs are considered major pillars for humanitarian, economic and sustainable development. They play a major role in enhancing democratic participation, improving living conditions of communities affected by different crises, empowering women and youth, maintaining peace, safeguarding rights and enhancing proper governance whether within the framework of the NGOs or within the society. However, some NGOs suffer from major structural problems that hinder the pace of its humanitarian and Emergency response (Internal governance of NGOs in Lebanon). It is widely recognized that the choice of organizational structure affects the project's performance. Organizational structure as described by Mintzberg usually defines the method by which individuals and groups are organized and their tasks are coordinated. Csaszar, the writer of the famous article, "Organizational structure as a determinant of performance", who developed and tested a model on the organizational structure and its effects on project's success or failure, referred to the organizational structure as a decision-making network among individuals, which influence the number of initiatives taken by the organization. In this regard, it is important to mention the work of Thomas Steward tackling the case of Signal company. This study defined the organizational structure as a systematic way of grouping tasks, reporting and organizing relationships and communication patterns within the organization. It depicts how the different parts of organizations fit as shown in any organization organogram. In addition to the structural factors, authors and researchers referred to many other factors that influence projects' performance. Belassi and Tukel developed a new comprehensive framework that grouped critical factors into four categories. The first factors group is related to the project including size and value; the second factors group is related to the project manager and team composition; the third factors group is related to the organization including structural factors; and the fourth and last factor group is related to the external environment.

Following his study on IT projects' success, Murray, J.P identified critical factors to be based on comprehensive project planning, top management commitment and support to the project, adequate funding, well done accurate set of project specification, proper project scheduling, risk assessment in addition to ensuring that organizations can stay the project course. Another study done on Chinese information systems companies by Dong et al. revealed that critical factors included effective communication, top management support, user involvement, project managers and team composition, project planning and definition, project control in addition to the technological support. In countries like Lebanon that host vast numbers of refugees fleeing the horror of war and armed conflicts, the NGOs effective response is of vital importance to refugees' wellbeing.

Utilizing the results of the literature, this research assessed the influence of four main factors on the projects' performance of NGOs in Lebanon. The four factors being project planning factors, team expertise factors, and structural factors in addition to the external factors. At first, the study looked into the influence of each single variable alone on projects performance in an attempt to identify and evaluate the impact of the adopted structure. Then, it was highly prominent to integrate all the factors together to assess and evaluate the influence of the structural factors among the other factors on the project's performance. The latter approach allowed the study to highlight the factors that can reduce the negative influence of the adopted structure in the organizations that suffer from a problem of inadequate structure. Most importantly, it enabled us to identify which structure had a significant positive influence on the projects' performance and thus can be specified as an optimal structure for managing NGOs projects. Questionnaires were designed based on the factors listed in this study and self-administered to professional project managers of NGOs in Lebanon. This research aims at identifying the structure that can optimize the performance of NGOs projects in Lebanon, therefore, it was limited to those large NGOs that have been operating for more than 10 years in Lebanon. Constraint by the desire of some project managers wishing to keep their projects' performance as confidential, this study was restricted to 20 Humanitarian NGOs. The target population is comprised of 200 project managers desegregated among the 5 organizational types. Systematic sampling was applied to each cluster in order to pick up the appropriate number of project managers from each organizational type to come up with a sample size of 132 project managers, which is most representative of the population. Retrieved questionnaires were analyzed using Pearson Product Moment Correlation and Regression Analysis provided by SPSS v25. Significant recommendations are made.