Looking to renew your organization? (C for Clarity)

Here’s an approach to renewing your organization, starting at the beginning (ABCDE):

Attract
new talent, additional resources

Build
relationships & teamwork

Clarify
roles & responsibilities

Develop
tools, skills & learning opportunities

Enable
clients & each other

CLARITY — CLARITY — CLARITY — CLARITY

Roles & Responsibilities
How do we clarify roles and responsibilities? This exercise is not an easy thing to pin down but once it’s done, if can prove to be more than useful: it’s critical. You avoid confusion, overlap, wasted resources and very few things get missed.

Blended Approach
To clarify roles and responsibilities, here are some of the steps to consider:
1. Establish a team to analyze current status
2. Define and list basic services, roles, responsibilities
3. Categorize common roles and responsibilities
4. Put together a plan that shows a combination of generalists and specialists and how they can work together
5. Communicate who does which service, who plays which role and who is responsible for what

The excerpt below (By Mark Price and James Works) is taken from the following site: http://http://finance.isixsigma.com/library/content/c040211a.asp

A typical model used to define, categorize and subsequently clarify roles and responsibilities is called RACI (pronounced ray-see). This model has four main categories that help determine the level of responsibility for a given role or task.
Responsibility — People who are to actively participate in the activity and contribute to the best of their abilities.
Accountability — The (pronounced ‘thee’) person who is ultimately responsible for the results.
Consultation — People who either have a particular expertise they can contribute to specific decisions (i.e., their advice will be sought) or who must be consulted for some other reason before a final decision is made (e.g., finance, HR, communications are often in a consulting role for projects).
Inform — People who are affected by the activity/decision and therefore need to be kept informed, but do not participate in the effort. (They are notified after the final decisions are made.)

Next steps
Communicate the process and the results

About the Authors of the RACI model: Mark Price is a vice president with George Group and has led Lean Six Sigma deployments for Global 500 clients in service and product companies. Mr. Price has been working with corporate teams to design and implement performance improvement programs for the last 15 years. He can be reached at mprice@georgegroup.com. James Works is president and chief operating officer of George Group. During the last 16 years, he has gained a reputation for making strategy actionable and for turning action into results through process improvement and complexity reduction. He has worked with CEOs and executive teams at companies such as ITT Industries, ALCAN, Xerox and Johns Manville. Mr. Works can be reached at jworks@georgegroup.com.

DE to come…Next week: D for Develop

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