Assignment 1: Ellen is Preparing for her first Internal Staff Meeting
McCallister has asked Ellen to attend a small group of other staff internal to his office to start to prepare for work with the Task Force. All members of the task force are external to McAllister’s office. Ellen has been told that all members of this internal staff group share her goals and perspective. Since she has only been on the job for a few days, she has not yet had a chance to get to meet any members of the external task force nor to study and understand their positions fully. However, these positions seem to have become quite prevalent across the United States and she does have some familiarity just from reading the newspaper and paying attention to what has been going on nationally. In preparation for the meeting of his internal staff, McAllister has quickly sketched out a preliminary set of policy actions that he might want to consider:
- Return to Lockdowns
- Global Mask Mandates
- Exemptions from Mask Mandates for certain circumstances or populations (schools, churches, shopping malls)
- Testing with Quarantines
- Contact Tracing with Quarantines
- Public Information Campaigns of various sorts
- Vaccine Mandates for selected populations (hospital workers, public worker, all workers, students)
Ellen’s first assignment is an individual assignment that she gives herself. Before going into the meeting, Ellen wants to settle her own thinking about the problem by writing out a short piece outlining here initial thoughts on what should be done next as well as a set of questions for members in the external task force. She is planning to explore the key stakeholder potential goals and concerns. She wants it to be polished enough that she would feel OK if it were to be shown to McAllister at the meeting the next day (even though he has not asked her for this product). In any case, she wants to hang onto this memo because it documents her best thinking about stakeholders, sources of evidence and interview questions for members in the task force as she starts to work on this project. She imagines that her policy memo would start:
From:
Subject:
Ellen Worthley, Assistant Manager
My initial Thoughts on Mask-Wearing and Vaccine Mandates and how to manage the task force
Footnotes
- John M. Bryson, Fran Ackermann, and Colin Eden, “Discovering Collaborative Advantage: The Contributions of Goal Categories and Visual Strategy Mapping,” Public Administration Review 76, no. 6 (December 11, 2016): 912–25, https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12608.
- John M. Bryson, “What to Do When Stakeholders Matter,” Public Management Review 6, no. 1 (March 2004): 21–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030410001675722.
