Author’s note 33 years after publication: Perhaps this paper’s most remarkable feature is that it made it to publication with its thesis statement in the third-last paragraph. To save you the trouble of wading through 45 paragraphs to find the thesis, I’ll give it to you now: Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structur. This turns out to be a principle with much broader utility than software project management, where references to it usually occur.