Roles and Co-ordination

Initial theory of roles in co-ordination:

  1. Co-ordinators - whose role is primarily co-ordination. This may be representatives within the team (e.g. HR or Finance people in Maintenance) or called "Communications Officer", "Liason Officer" or "Customer Relationship Manager", or sometimes someone who has been rotated through a different group, so although not having formally this role, act it out in practice;
  2. Managers - who have a primary role in co-ordination, both for activities within the unit and between the unit and other units;
  3. Process Actors - who have a job to do, but who sometimes have to co-ordination activities (e.g. negotiate resources)

These are listed in the expected most to least percentage of work involving co-ordination. We might be interested to consider work by Managers which is not co-ordination.

Process Actors may co-ordinate throgh artifacts. Managers prefer to co-ordination face to face [1, p25]. Also we need to consider process administrators [2] who may co-ordinate by creating processes, or IT systems developers who co-ordinate through creating IT systems with built in process assumptions.


Bibliography
1. Mintzberg, H. 2009, Managing, Berret-Koehler, San Francisco.
2. Mintzberg, H. 1979, The Structuring of Organizations, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs.
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