Designing Roles Based on the Nature and Level of Work

Speaker A I'm really struck by how the clarification of role has influenced the design of practice in the organization and I think that is testament to a lot of the work that went by going back to Wolford Brown and discussing that necessarily. I've not heard that so clearly.

Speaker B Actually from that number katie drummed it into know now it sounds so simplistic and even trite when somebody will bring a problem in and they'll be bringing.org charts in. I says what is the work that we're asking this role to do? What kinds of decisions, what kind of interfaces? And pretty simple and when people start thinking about it they say well maybe it ought to work this way instead of the way I thought it was going to work and maybe we had to put these kind of people in this role instead of this kind of work. And I just had one. You mentioned how's it affected external relationships. We have a fairly large energy efficiency business where we deliver energy efficiency to our customers and we've created partnerships with a number of communities, city mayors and city councilmen and so forth and we try and partner with the cities so that we get local buy in for the energy efficiency programs that get delivered to the customers. So we had an organization proposal on how to staff this so we could establish these partnership roles and they had the role defined initially at a very low level, maybe a stratum two interfacing with mayors or city councilmen. And so when we worked it through we redesigned that whole organization such that these roles were now much more at a higher level and not nearly as much bureaucracy on top of them before you got to the senior manager of the organization. And so we're implementing that now and it seems to be working great. Again if we can find the right number of people to put in the roles. But I think that the design is right and that's all based on a simple question is what is the work that we're going to do here's?