Understand how an organization's mission directly shapes position design and structure across its units. Learn to evaluate organizational components and position responsibilities in alignment with strategic goals and operational efficiency.
Key Insights
- Connect the mission of an organization to how positions are classified and structured, ensuring each role contributes to achieving unit and agency objectives.
- Evaluate organizational structure by breaking down departments into independent entities to assess how each contributes to the broader mission.
- Apply key factors, such as service outputs, input materials, and processes, to define organizational work and guide effective position design.
This lesson is a preview from our Federal Position Management Course and Certified Federal HR Business Partner (cFHRBP) Level III Certificate Program. Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Welcome back for Module 2. Module 2 is Position Management Basics. In this module, we'll discuss how the organization's mission impacts position design. Remember, earlier I told you that position design is just position classification, creating positions.
We're going to identify the various types of organizational structures and their effect on position design. We're going to describe the numerous factors that must be balanced in the position design process. We're going to apply the common patterns of assigning duties to positions.
And so before we move on into the course material, I want you to look at Appendix A. Appendix A is going to be pivotal for you at this point in the training. Appendix A looks at or gives you a glossary of position management terms, and you want to familiarize yourself with those position management terms so that you can better understand the course material. And so make sure you take a minute and look at that Appendix A, the glossary of terms.
You want to understand the terms for position management. All right, the learning outcomes, we've already mentioned those. And so now we're going to get into the organization's mission and goals.
And so you want to think about an organization. An organization can be viewed as a whole or as an independent entity within a whole. And so if you think about a department, we think about the entire department.
And within that department, there may be bureaus, there may be agencies, there may be offices, there may be units. And so, whatever part of the organization you are looking at, you can consider that the whole is an independent entity within the entire department or within the entire agency. And so you want to think about how the organization is designed.
And so at this point, you're going to need to have organizational charts, organizational charts. And so you want to make sure you understand that there is an interrelationship between positions and the organization in which they exist. And so, you want to understand that each position contributes to accomplishing that unit's mission.
And remember, earlier I said we create positions to get the mission of the organization accomplished. And so you want to think about how each unit contributes to the mission of the organization as a whole. And so remember, we're going to have two wholes: the entire department or an independent entity within that entire department.
And so we look at an example, we could see that the U.S. Forest Service is considered a whole. An independent entity within that whole, the U.S. Forest Service, would be the Rocky Mountain Region, the Arapahoe National Forest, the Administrative Division, and then the Budget Office. And so we see how we broke that organization down from the whole into the independent entities.
All right. And so the plan for position design is to evaluate that organization or that whole by its contribution to both the immediate whole and the entire department or the bigger whole. All right.
Or the larger organization. Each organization has a mission, and they have goals, and they are tied to accomplishing the overall mission of the whole. And so these can be used to evaluate whether a structure is both a unit in itself and the positions within it contribute toward the accomplishment of the entire agency mission.
And we also want to remember that we're looking at it to ensure that the agency's mission is carried out efficiently, effectively, and economically. And so you want to evaluate the type of work in the organization by asking some questions. What product or service is supposed to come out of that organization? From what materials or information coming into that unit is the product or service being produced? What process is to be followed to get that accomplished? And so these additional questions, these questions are used to think about the organizational design level, to define the type of work the organization is tasked with by its mission to produce whatever product or service they're providing.
Position management level is to define the purpose of the position.
