Professional services. Flat. Partner team (Dave, Jeremy, and I) with Dave as President. 3 offices (NYC, Chicago, SF). Practice managers for each office help manage the schedule, backstop client concerns, stuff like that. Lots of ongoing projects, each led by a senior team member. Partner team and practice managers all deliver work alongside consultants. Supporting team for project management, for finance, for IT, and for development.
Some functional divisions of work; for instance, I run recruiting, and a team of consultants runs research and judges bonuses for developing tools or writing papers. But mostly, deliberately flat.
Here are a barrage of further questions that I hope you don't find too annoying:
Do you assign specific teams to each project? I assume project leader to project is one-to-many (since you said senior member); is project manager to project one-to-one? How many consultants are typically assigned to a project? Are developers assigned to specific projects from the start or do project managers send requests to developers on an as-needed basis? If it's the latter, do requests get sent to some sort of development leader/manager type or do project managers ask around to see which developers have the bandwidth for their project?
Also, and this isn't particularly related to structure, but how do sales work in your organization? Do the partners handle it for the most part?
I'm not asking these questions merely to annoy you; they apply to the business I am in the process of building. (So far, we've got a flat partner team of three and a single part-time employee. We're experimenting with a contracted salesperson, which has been working surprisingly well until now.)
Yes, 1 team 1 project (no overlap, every project is full-time). Project lead is 1:1 too. Practice managers are 1:many, but aren't intimately involved in delivery. Projects generally rotate among staff; staff aren't permanently allocated to clients. Practice managers collaborate with partners and project manager to work out the schedule. We book pretty far in advance.
Some functional divisions of work; for instance, I run recruiting, and a team of consultants runs research and judges bonuses for developing tools or writing papers. But mostly, deliberately flat.