Reorganizing the department: bringing people together to rethink and change their work

So we had several resignations for personal reasons or career advancement and therefore open slots in our department. We looked at that as an opportunity to rethink the work that everyone did. We brought the staff together once again, everybody in one room at one time with the big giant whiteboard. We began by writing creating a list of every activity that we were currently doing or that we wanted to do in the near future. It took a couple hours. After that we wrote each of those one sentence actiovities on a sticky and then we rested for a couple days.

Our next step was to take big Post-it notes and start organizing and putting together the functions that seemed like they could be done by the same person. The idea was not identifying who currently did these activities but rather seeing which activities might fall into different buckets. We then gave titles to the people who could do each of these operations, and the miscellaneous category wasnt too bad, fewer than 10 items.

The end result was that the staff concluded we could shrink the staff by 2 people if we realigned responsibilities and created one new position because there were many “to-do” items nobody was working on. The reorg worked. Was it because of the people or the process? That is something I do not know.