Restructuring, inside and out

NOTE: The following article appeared in the August 2002 edition of Association Management, the magazine of the American Society of Association Executives. It is reprinted with permission, copyright August 2002, American Society of Association Executives, Washington, D.C.

By Tom Hood, MACPA Executive Director
and Bill Sheridan, MACPA Electronic Communications Manager

Thinking of restructuring your organization? Here's some advice from those who've been through the process at the Maryland Association of Certified Public Accountants.

Consider general steps

MACPA followed four key provisos when embarking on its restructuring process.

Involve your members — and a lot of them. Those who worked on MACPA's project say a grassroots effort is key. "You have to involve people who normally might not participate," says board member Tami Bensky, senior manager, Clifton Gunderson, Timonium. "Otherwise, you're just turning over the same ideas."
Study your history. "Before you can even start, you have to take a very introspective look at where you've been and how you got there," says volunteer Marty Yospa, partner, Gorfine, Schiller & Gardyn, Owings Mills. "You have to find out why you're doing what you do and ask yourself whether (anything) is broken." Adds former MACPA President Carter Heim, managing partner, HeimLantz Business and Tax Services, Annapolis: "There's a lot of groundwork that has to be laid to understand where you are today and what might be out there for the future."
Consider using technology. "Sometimes you need an alternative place to store (data) and a structure your volunteers can use to share information," says Heim. For example, members of MACPA's Under-35 Structure and Governance Task Force made extensive use of an Internet discussion forum as a way to exchange information. "In fact," says Bensky, "I think there were some members (of the task force) who only participated electronically."
Be prepared to put the plan into place. If you truly want a grassroots plan to restructure your organization, you have to be eager to accept the proposals produced by your members. "If you're not willing to trust the process and accept the results as valid, then the process loses all credibility," says Bensky.

Create specific goals

Recommendations from the design team tasked with creating MACPA's restructuring plan affected the organization of both staff and governance. The team identified five goals for governance and structure:

Align with vision and mission of MACPA.
Build a community of value by and among members.
Expand MACPA's relationships with members.
Streamline the Board of Directors to operate more efficiently.
Retain board diversity and demographic mix of members.

The anticipated results included connecting to members in new ways; creating new opportunities for members; promoting communication with members; building a stronger, more effective staff; and establishing a collaborative relationship between board and staff.

Take appropriate action

The recommendations from the design team reflected changes to both volunteer and staff structure.

Volunteer leadership. For volunteer leadership, the restructuring meant changing the composition of both the executive committee and the board. While the executive committee went from seven to six members, the board was reduced from 22 members to 14.
Staff. MACPA's staff was organized in a vertical structure based on typical departments (marketing and communication, membership, professional development, and so on), a model which often impedes the flow of value to the member or customer when intradepartment hand-offs get delayed or turf battles occur.

The new structure, which was agreed upon by an internal, staff-led team, was based on a horizontal view. In essence, asking the staff person to look back from the members' point of view and ask how they receive value — then rebuild the organization from that perspective. Thus, MACPA now has several major ways to deliver value to members and each one of those is assigned to a director or manager who is responsible for the ultimate results. Each value stream becomes a self-directed work team with representatives from other disciplines (formerly departments) as needed to deliver their value proposition to the members. This type of structure also lends itself to activity-based accounting, by allocating staff time across value streams, which is quite useful for setting priorities and evaluating programs that may be intangible or difficult to measure, such as image promotion and legislative advocacy.

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