How to Build a Candidate Prep/Policy Team Part 2 - Structure

So In my last article, I outlined the various things that go into making a good Candidate Prep/Policy team.

Now I want to talk about how to structure your team. At Larry Sharpe for New York, we have a policy team that is led by a Director, we have several Deputy Directors, each which has their own team to cover a broad range of topics. For us, our topics are:

*Social/Legal
*Economic
*Infrastructure

and one more added later:

*Oppo Research

Not every policy team will have this exact structure, and most will not include the Opposition Research team, it just worked out for us that we were the best team to handle this.

Each Deputy Director should have some knowledge in their subject area, both specific and broad.

Underneath the Deputy Director are a team of analysts that have both broad knowledge and at least one or two floating subject matter experts.

On our team, we've drafted Doctors, Lawyers, Economists, people who work in the industries we are tackling. These people have years upon years of experience with these subjects, and can help your team come up with realistic solutions based on the subject matter they work in.

Our broad analysts are people who like to research and come up with novel solutions for problems facing our constituency.

We've also added one more type in, someone to sit in on the policy team, and do initial write-ups of the policies, as sometimes, the papers take a while to get done. This ensures policy gets out, and onto our website in a timely manner.

Whatever teams you may form, depending on what logically separates issues that your team may be working on, the structure of each team should be around teams of 4-5 people, under that and you don't have the manpower to work on larger issues (in our case, 2nd Amendment, Criminal Justice, fixing the MTA, Healthcare, and Education are all huge projects and require manpower to research and discuss), with your SME (Subject Matter Expert) being involved.

Any larger, and you lose the agility to get things out quickly. It's harder to get people (especially volunteers, as we have to do in the LP, hopefully that will change as we run more and more successful campaigns and there is a money base in the Libertarian Party) to meet all at once. Coordination is difficult at larger sizes.

One more thing. If you are the Director, get yourself a good assistant. You will need them. This person forms the role of personal assistant, a pseudo-Director that can contact people, set up meetings, and get people to where they need to be. This has been invaluable to me and my team as we start to get more into campaign season, and as a Director, you spend more time in contacting people, getting input from people affected, and trying to find out what the people in your area need.

This structure works well with our methodology, which we've based on Agile Software Development methods, and will cover in a later installment.