Riordan Chief of Staff Ouchi Resigns : City Hall: Mayor’s top aide returns to UCLA full time. Deputy Mayor Robin Kramer will replace him and a chief operating officer position will be created.

William G. Ouchi, the acclaimed UCLA management professor who became business-oriented Mayor Richard Riordan’s chief of staff, will leave Friday to return to his university duties, the mayor’s office said Wednesday.

Deputy Mayor Robin Kramer, a former council aide and lobbyist with a reputation for strong people skills, will take over the job of the sometimes controversial Ouchi, effective Monday. At the same time, Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley, chief architect of the mayor’s budget and a longtime friend and protege from Riordan’s law firm, will be promoted to the newly created position of chief operating officer.

The shift at the top of Riordan’s administrative team ended several weeks of rumors that Ouchi, whose two-year leave of absence from UCLA ends this month, was stepping aside.

“Bill has been a good friend and adviser to me for nearly two decades,” Riordan said in a statement released by his press office. “It is a unique and rare opportunity for any city government to enjoy the services of an organizational management expert of Bill’s international reputation and experience. I am honored that he joined my Administration and respect his wishes to return to academia and consulting.”

Ouchi, 52, a senior policy adviser to Riordan before a staff shake-up a year ago put him in the Administration’s top job, has been the idea man in the mayor’s quest to bring private industry management techniques and standards to the city’s vast bureaucracy.

The Santa Monica resident helped shape many of the mayor’s policy initiatives, including a merit pay plan for department heads, efforts to hone the giant Department of Water and Power, and proposals to overhaul the city’s development permit system. Last spring, Ouchi brought department heads together with academics from UCLA at a weekend retreat on management practices.

Critics said he was too theoretical and displayed little respect for, or understanding of, the political process. A complicated arrangement in which a private organization continued to pay most of his UCLA salary while he headed the mayor’s staff stirred controversy for its potentially problematic blurring of private and public accountability lines. Under the arrangement, Ouchi was to spend 15% of his time on city duties and the rest on research connected to his university role.

There also were rumors of growing discord between Ouchi and Keeley, considered the most influential of Riordan’s six deputy mayors. Kramer on Wednesday downplayed the disagreements.

“This is a place where people speak their minds . . . and that’s healthy,” Kramer said in a joint telephone interview she gave with Keeley, vacationing in New York.

As chief of staff, Kramer, 42, said her job is to “see that our very capable group of people all knit together well.”

A Hancock Park resident, Kramer played several roles at City Hall before joining the Riordan staff to improve the Administration’s relationship with the City Council and other key players. She formerly was chief of staff to Councilman Richard Alatorre, Riordan’s closest ally on the 15-member panel.

Keeley, a Hollywood resident who turns 42 next week, said he and Kramer together will “be fleshing out” the details of their new roles as they go along. As chief operating officer--a title common in corporate culture but new at City Hall--Keeley will continue to have primary responsibility for oversight of the city’s budget and operations.

“Robin and Mike each bring strong and complementary skills to my Administration,” Riordan said. “They have also demonstrated their ability to work together as a team.”

Some of Riordan’s close associates said the Kramer-Keeley pairing is a good choice as the mayor enters the second half of his first term and prepares to run for another.

“It’s fairly evident that Dr. Ouchi brought a fresh perspective, a private organizational perspective, that facilitated our analysis” of ways to run the city more efficiently, said Dan Garcia, chairman of the Community Redevelopment Agency and a key player in several other areas of the Administration. “But Mike is less of a theoretician, and Robin has more government experience . . . and much more sensitivity when it comes to dealing with people.”