Camelot Consulting Group

* Coordinators.

Coordinators help others within the organization, at least in part by helping them come to agreement with one another.

Coordinators help people individually by offering expertise and methods. In this way, they're like People-based Service Bureaus. Coordinators maintain an expertise in something other than the organization's products and services, and supply supporting products and services to customers, primarily with the organization itself.

But in the case of Coordinators, one key aspect of serving peers is helping them agree with one another where consistency among peers is required. In addition to contributing their own expertise, Coordinators facilitate a consensus of stakeholders on issues within their domain. This is the "coordinating" aspect of their work.

A common example is business strategy planning (deciding what business the organization should be in, and what it needs to do to get there).

Ideally, every entrepreneur in the organization develops a business strategy for his or her business within a business. But since strategic planning is a profession in its own right, the various managers may not be experts in developing business strategies. The Business Planning Coordinator supplies that expertise.

But in addition, everyone's individual strategies must plug together to form the organization's strategy. This is why coordination is needed.

The Business Planning Coordinator supplies a common set of environmental assumptions, formats, and time frames; and then ensures that people throughout the organization collaborate to come up with integrated, synergistic strategies.

There are a number of types of Coordinators, including the following:

* Business planning: Described above.

* Organizational effectiveness: Facilitates improvements in how the organization does business, including its culture, structure, internal economy, and metrics. Also coordinates employee communications.

* Standards: Sometimes called the "architect," builds consensus on constraints on product design that facilitate future integration and support.

* Business continuity: Facilitates planning for disaster recovery and continuing to do business through catastrophic events, the testing of those plans, and ultimately the exercise of those plans if needed.

* Security policies: Facilitates agreement on policies that make the business safer from espionage, theft, and sabotage. Also coordinates investigations of problems.

* Design: Helps multiple Technologist groups understand their technical interdependences (mapping the "ripples"), and coordinating their parallel projects.

* Research: Helps staff develop research proposals; helps the executive manage limited research funds and the portfolio of research projects such that everybody's research fits the business plan; and helps staff perform research.

Although similar in that they are coordination and facilitation functions, each of these types of Coordinators entails unique backgrounds and skills, and each is a profession (a line of business, i.e., a building block at the next level of detail) in its own right.