Director's Message: New Management Structure Takes Effect

Greetings everyone,

The Alaska Legislature has gone home for another year and DPA received relatively little budgetary impact from lawmakers. Because most of our programs are federally funded and those federal funds require a certain percentage of state dollars to match, the majority of lawmakers declined to tinker with our budget.

The bigger news today concerns our ongoing reorganization. Late last week, your executive managers met and finalized a new, expanded management group for DPA. The purpose of that group is to bring more leaders from more sections to the decisionmaking table. We hope that doing so will result in more creative ideas, better problem solving and better information flow from the frontline staff to the managers and vice versa.

Today, that new and expanded group met for the first time. My thanks and congratulations to Paul Schoenborn, Randy Moore and Amy Yardley who stepped up to the challenges posed by this reorganization. We welcome their participation and assistance.

Please view the new organizational chart, which now has the managers names posted. The reallocation of supervisory authority is effective immediately. While it will take these new managers some time to write their management plan, they have hit the ground running!

You may ask while looking at the chart,"How does this affect me?'' Don't worry. By and large, most staff daily job duties remain the same. Only the management-level supervisor may have changed. The goal is to align our sections into teams, composed of units that work more naturally together. There will be some persons who are time-allocated between old work units who may be asking, "Who do I report to now?" Our managers will spend the next few weeks sorting through those types of issues.

Their management plan, when completed, will organize each unit of each section of DPA. I have asked that the managers consult with you and get ideas and feedback from their new teammates. I ask that you be patient with us while we try to improve the way we do business and the way information gets to you.

Shortly, we will convene an information and feedback team composed of frontline staff. Once this group is up and running, you all will have a voice in the changing environment at DPA. The regional managers and other program coordinators have collected names of staff who would like to participate. In keeping with my belief that excellent performers provide excellent feedback, those of you who will participate are among DPA's best.

If you have questions about the rationale behind some of these management changes please contact your supervisor or any of our DPA managers so your questions and comments can be shared with the feedback team. This team will be a valuable communications tool as we move through this reorganization process.

I thank you all too, for volunteering to make our vision of a more open, honest and efficient team at DPA a reality. The next few months will be a time of challenge, change and opportunity. Please support your managers in their efforts to make DPA even better. It's a hard job and we can't do it without you!

Please feel free to contact me at Anthony_Lombardo@health.state.ak.us if you have any questions or comments on the work we have done so far.

View the new management org chart.