OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Identify an organization and situation you want to study over the remainder of the course.
2. Describe the organization and situation.

Confidential – Do not share

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Describe your organization.

The organization I’d like to is Desert Financial, which is one of the largest local financial
institutions in the state of Arizona. In particular, I’d like to analyze the Office of Strategy
management for Desert Financial. This area of the business is relatively new, having
been started in 2020 to help better manager the organzation’s strategy and strategic goals.
It is responsible for collaborating with senior leadership to help drive our strategy
forward, align our work to our goals, and shepherd work forward.

2) Describe your role in the organization (it can be internal or external).

My role in this organization is the VP of Strategy. As the VP of strategy, I have several

employees who help manage and facilitate our strategic planning, who are assigned so
various components of our strategic plan. I work closely with senior leaders in the
organization to determine what it is we need to do to meet our goals, choose what work to
prioritize, and how to best communicate the why of the decisions we make to our staff. I
also spend a lot of time helping other areas of the business create their own plans that
align to our overarching strategy. I also have the product management team for the
organization that reports to me.

3) Describe the situation. (see the Canvas instructions for details, especially about how
your situation will be analyzed from five different perspectives over the next five
modules)

As I mentioned above, the Office of Strategy Management (OSM) is a relatively new

area in the business. Myself and one of my peers, let’s cal her Mal, stood up this
department in 2020 to help further our strategic planning and management. I’m more of
a big ideas person, while she has a project management background, which meant we

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 complemented each-other very well. Initially as we stood up the OSM, we were the only
two employees and strove to split up work evenly, but based on our own skills. Over
time, Mal hired several program managers (let’s call them Ben and Jen), who were
designed to help us facilitate our strategy. While they reported to her, they also took
much of their direction from me. During the time she was hiring them, there was a
restructure, and she also received several new areas of responsibility, internal
communications, events, and our partnerships with local sports teams.

About a year ago, and only a few months after the changes above, Mal was set to go on
maternity leave for 3 months. As her focus had shifted to her new teams, we had talked
about having Jen and Ben start reporting to me, to allow her to focus on her new areas.
We were not ready to make the call as she went on her leave one month earlier than
planned. Not only did Jen and Ben report to me on a temporary basis, but so did her
internal comms, evenets, and partners teams. Almost immediately, I started to see some
issues with the team. In particular, Jen and Ben didn’t get along the best, and Jen wasn’t
particularly happy at work.

As worked to lead this new team, I started to dig into the root cause of the issues. Jen and
Ben just had very different personalities that sometimes clashed, and Ben was more
outspoken which usually meant that his ideas got more attention. Over a 3 month period
I worked through these issues. Ben and Jen started to build a better relationship, and
when Mal came back, they both remained on my team, where they work very closely and
well now.

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 Reference or References