From Rigid Models to Agile Teams: Lessons from Project Organizational Structures for Educational Planning and Innovation

The aim of this research is to find out how the organizational structure of projects has evolved from 1977 to 2024, moving from a hierarchical and rigid structure to a more flexible and team-oriented one; and to find out the design factors of organizational structures that different researchers have put forward during the same period. The study selected 100 articles from Scopus, WOS and Scholar Google and analyzed their evolution. This study found that there are mainly eight types of organizational structures in projects: Functional, Functional or weak matrix, Balanced matrix, Projectized or strong matrix, Project-led organization, Project-based organization, Network or networking and Virtual in addition to identifying 65 unified design factors that have been named but not statistically validated. These findings extend and unify the analysis of project organizational structures and are a basis for future research and extension of existing theories. Received: 16 February 2025 / Accepted: 27 April 2025 / Published: 08 May 2025