For our purpose reorganization and restructuring have interchangeable meanings. The greatest danger with reorganization is simply throwing different organizations together to reduce personnel by combining duplicate or nearly duplicate processes. This can lead to internal turf battles over petty issues like, how big my office is, or how far away am I from the boss’s office etc. Productivity gains can be lost in a quagmire of endless bickering. It is better to leave an organization in place and restructure its functions and processes. For more information see Article 17. “Comparing Terms for Government: Auditing, Restructuring, Reform, and Efficiency“.

What should be done is to make sure that functions are clearly identified within a department and budgeted separately. Then if reorganization is necessary the function can be more easily moved to where it makes the most sense. Each department or organization contains one or more functions and these are usually vertical functions. A function must satisfy a specific “need” (service to the state’s public) and contains a set of processes to accomplish this.

An example of a vertical function is “elementary education” within the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. An example of a horizontal function is “child welfare”, which crosses such vertical functions as ”foster parents”, “elementary education”, “secondary education”, “juvenile justice”, “public health” etc. Because of the fact that a particular state organization or department my have both vertical and horizontal functional obligations well meaning persons may try to switch a vertical structured organization into a horizontally structured organization. It cannot be structured both ways and there is little to be gained in this type of reorganization.

A state level horizontal function is managed by a Cabinet (as some states call this organization) where most of the members come from the various vertical functions that have obligations to the horizontal function. This is a policy making Steering Management Team of stake holders who makes the rules both practical and legal (with legislative approval) for the county level horizontal function Work Improvement Teams (WITs). County level WITs are the best and safest way to provide management and over site for horizontal functions such as “child welfare“. One of the obligations of the state level Cabinet is to review the process flow charts developed by each county level WIT and to recommend the implementation of the best process flow charts. The Cabinet is also responsible for the development of the budget for the horizontal function. The WIT’s process flow charts provide the basis for calculating the number of caseworkers needed at the county level. Caseworkers may have to be moved to counties where caseloads have increased. For information on how to implement a WIT see Article 11. “Adaptation of Manufacturing Quality Improvement Techniques to Achieve Efficient Government “.

The State budget should fund functions not departments or organizations. This will aid restructuring by isolating the function and allow actual manpower and expenses to be more easily calculated when “WITs” or “Cost and Schedule” efficiency implementations are made. The state budget should be based on prioritized functions selected by the executive branch and the legislative branch unsupported functions are not funded. For more information see Article 22. “Functional Restructuring of State Government rather than Departmental Restructuring“. See also Article 151. The Promise of Going ‘Lean’ and
Article 152. The Process of Replacing Bureaucratic Management With Lean Teams