Delineation of Roles and Responsibilities

Description

• A detailed description of roles and responsibilities for “To-Be” processes and subprocesses.  Roles and responsibilities are mapped against proposed organisational units or potential categories of personnel.

Client Value

• Serves as a mechanism to identify clearly which organisational unit or categories of personnel will be responsible for specific processes (thereby reducing the potential for confusion and duplicated efforts).
• Clarification of key roles and responsibilities with respect to redesigned processes supports the development of the organisation Structure.  It also provides the foundation for the development of Position/Competency Profiles, the reclassification of jobs and the hiring or reassignment of staff.

Approach

This will continue out of the work to build the “To-Be” models, to define where roles and responsibilities will lie within the organisation.  Roles and responsibilities needed for the new environment will need to be defined and associated with the appropriate unit and positions defined in the organisation Structure.

1. Construct a table linking key, proposed organisational unit / personnel categories to redesigned processes.
2. Obtain consensus from decision-makers (e.g. senior management) on the delineation of roles and responsibilities.
3. Finalise the table, and integrate it with the proposed Organisation Structure.

Guidelines

Tactics/Helpful Hints

• When delineating roles and responsibilities, consider the following organisational principles:
• Combine managerial and non-managerial responsibilities as often as possible—i.e. empower employees and teams, giving organisational units appropriate responsibility for managerial tasks (e.g. hiring, evaluating and scheduling).
• Wherever possible, assign responsibility for a complete process to a single unit or “process team”.  Establish “one-stop-shopping” customer interaction (i.e. the handling of a majority of typical customer requests by the first point of contact).  Group competencies together and expect incumbents of positions to be multi-skilled.
• Ensure accessibility (i.e. easy contact) with clients, suppliers and other stakeholders.
• Ensure an even distribution of workload.
• Clearly define the extent of the key individuals’ authority and responsibility.
• When completing the roles/responsibilities table, the BPI Team can indicate with a dot or asterisk which tasks are to be accomplished in the future by which position.  Unresolved tasks can be flagged for discussion with senior management with a question mark.