Week Five: Organizational Hierarchy, Management Structure, and Communication Methods

          Since the WSBN isn’t an organization yet, the organizational hierarchy is short.  The three persons who are actively involved in getting it started are: Philip Niddrie, Cathy Walsh, and Bonnie Dang.  They are all equally involved in forming the WSBN and play similar roles in its process.  The only other person involved is myself, and all three of them oversee what I do for the team.  A chart of the organizational hierarchy would look along the lines of this:

Philip Niddrie, Cathy Walsh, Bonnie Dang

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Caroline Early

            There isn’t a formal management structure of the WSBN so to speak because there are only three people actively involved, and they all have the same involvement.  The formal portion of the management would be that they all oversee me because I am the intern that is there to help them.  But the informal management structure would be that Phil for the most part will speak to the city and take care of most of the work involved with the technicalities of getting things done, for example he handled getting all the brochures I made printed.  Cathy and Bonnie work more together as the creative minds that give me more direction than Phil, but are still on the same level. 

            I have found that the informal structure and formal structure are ultimately the same in this situation because of the equality.  In the case of why it works would be that the three of them balance themselves out and work well together to come up with idea to kick-start the WSBN.  There is no direct orders coming from anyone of them, which works well when I am getting direction from them because they are all on the same page and nothing gets lost in translation.  For example, when the brochure was being outlined, they all knew what they wanted it to roughly look like and all the criteria that needed to be in it, so when I was typing it up and getting pictures I knew exactly how they wanted it to be, which left little room for error. 

            For communication, we contact each other through email about available times to meet, and then all four of us will sit down and meet about what we have accomplished since the last meeting and what needs to be done for the next.  Email is the best to reach all of us about meeting times, and then the actual meeting is the best way to talk about new ideas so we are all on the same page.  We also use a “digital drop box” to share files that we work on so we can all see what is being done so decrease overlap or information while we are between meetings.  None of our communication thus far has been ineffective.