Musical Exec Chairs Steps Up At City
“The senior leadership team continues to invest significantly in succession planning to ensure both the short- and long-term success of the organization.”
Wendy Stephanson, Ottawa City Manager
Well of course.
The succession planning at the City of Ottawa looks like an episode of the Keystone Cops.
The keystone to Stephanson’s initiative to deal with the problems of the city was a vigorous re-organization a few weeks ago of the org chart … the bureaucrats’ best friend.
That’s also known as re-shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.
So here we go and pay attention to follow this arcane list of occurrences closely.
The star move in the deck-chair dance was to create a strategic initiatives department. A few weeks later the “interim” general manager of the mighty SI (which kicked off its existence with an incomprehensible report) became the full-time chief of emergency and protective services.
Except a team of people will run the EPS department who were already there while new EPS general manager continues his duties at SI until a new SI chief is found. According to Stephanson, the SI search is well underway. Remember, however, that the city has had a horrible time getting qualified job candidates because its image in the municipal world and beyond is that of a dumpster fire.
So to make this clear (kinda), the new interim SI chief is now the general manager of EPS but continues his duties as interim SI chief while a team of EPS folks run EPS until a successor to the interim SI chief is found except that the city has had trouble finding good people because of the aforementioned dumpster fire.
And how important is EPS? Oh it just runs the paramedic service and the fire service to name a few critical responsibilities.
And that’s the update on the City of Ottawa managerial musical chairs. No word if the new Stephanson org chart is actually a dart board.
Ken Gray
This was the process used to create the new City of Ottawa org chart.
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The City has to move quickly to fill the positions of those who lead the Official Plan and others who have left. Remember the Strong Mayors Act gave Mayors the capacity to appoint staff at all levels. This breaks the centuries of parliamentary tradition of an independent public service.
I imagine they are doing what they can to find qualified staff before the Ontario offices here become the HR department,