How to Scale Hierarchical Organizational Structure to Fit Your Capitol Programs

September 3, 2025

Patricia McCarter

Capital projects are getting more complex by the day. Projects and programs may have overlap between vendors, contractors, manufacturers, material sources and even contracts.

That's why it's important to have a program management information solution (PMIS) that can be configured in unique ways, and also handle cost codes, governance regulations and data access that may be unique--or shared--between projects or programs.

But when projects are managed in "flat" project management systems ... yikes.

In a flat system, there's no way to connect resources among programs and projects, resulting in confusion, duplication and lost time. Each vendor or contractor may track their own budgets, schedules, and documents separately and in different systems (or spreadsheets), leaving the owner to stitch everything together after the fact.

That can mean:

Delayed reporting: By the time financial or schedule data rolls up to leadership, it’s already outdated.
Duplicate data entry: The same cost codes or documents get entered in multiple systems, creating version-control nightmares.
Audit and compliance risks: Without a clear roll-up, agencies struggle to show exactly where funds went—putting public trust on the line.
Hidden overruns: Without visibility across projects, a small overspend on one project may not trigger alarms until it has ballooned across the program.

To run an efficient program, project owners must be able to roll up and view projects at program or project level. And you have to be able to configure the organizational structure, especially for very complex programs.

That's why Kahua platform has a built-in hierarchical structure of projects to easily define specific program or project structure at any level of detail.

Watch Kahua with Kevin to see it in action:

This built-in ability lets you capture all project and program data in one optimized assessment, and create hierarchal structures that are unique to your business, including dashboards and reports.

This allows for the ability to report for both top-down and bottom-up visibility. The power of Kahua versus other PMIS offerings is the flexibility at any level of the organizational structure.

This includes multiple environments supporting unique configuration of workflows, work breakdown/activity code structure, nomenclature, templates, user security and more.

In addition, if programs alternate from working on a megaproject to a small renovation project, you most likely will not have the same workflows. The authority matrix and business rules on large, complex projects are much more layered than on the smaller ones, as the need for more robust workflows is necessary.

Users can change this configuration at any time during the project, whatever the organization needs to work in that moment without compromising the integrity of reports and dashboards. Evolve your system not just for today but anytime down the road.

Regardless of complexity or financial scope, you can efficiently track all information for programs and projects. Kahua makes it simple to build out a program hierarchy and manage budgets, commitments, changes and documents.

You can also easily access live dashboards and reports at any level of your organization’s hierarchy, utilizing automatic roll-up functionality alongside drill-down capabilities, to maintain transparency and control at the level of detail you need.

Kahua lets you see what you want to see, how you want to see it, with configuration at any level of the organizational structure including: