Longtime Doc employee John Barkla, in his new role as Otago community technical adviser, explained the restructuring and its impact in Otago to about 50 people at the yellow-eyed penguin annual symposium in Dunedin on Saturday.
Mr Barkla said the department undertook "quite a scary" exercise a couple of years ago to determine the cost of putting all New Zealand species on the path to recovery.
"When the numbers got into the billions we stopped counting.
"It brought it home to us that here was a job that was way bigger than Doc, and the only way to make inroads was to involve a whole lot more people," he said.
So instead of continuing to look inward, Doc changed its focus to those outside the department who were able to work towards the same objectives for conserving the country's natural resources.
Its priority was to inspire and support individuals, communities, groups and organisations in their collective conservation efforts to ensure common goals were achieved, Mr Barkla said.
"The department now really wants to talk to all those people and look at the extent to which our interests match up, and sit down and think about to what extent we can combine efforts and support each other," he said.
A major change involved pooling Doc's specialists in each conservancy so they became a shared national resource.
The six new Otago conservancy roles included two yet to be filled - a "pou tairanahau" and business development manager, Mr Barkla said.
The pou tairanahau's responsibility was to develop initiatives and projects to enhance partnerships with whanau, hapu and iwi.
The business development manager would work with businesses to increase industry contribution to conservation.
Ken Stewart, formerly the Otago conservancy's community relations manager, was the new community support manager. Mr Barkla was part of that team.
Andrea Crawford had cemented her media role with the conservancy as its new communications and engagement adviser.
Former Doc community relations officer Claudia Babirat was the new community outreach co-ordinator and would seek new partnerships and collaborations for conservation work.
Asked whether the restructure had affected the overall number of Otago's Doc employees, Mr Barkla said it had not, but some in the region were no longer strictly working for the conservancy, but for the department nationally.
