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The Number 1 Reason RPA Projects Fail

How to stop RPA failure? Up to 50% of RPA projects fail during or after the initial implementation according to a recent Ernst and Young’s report. Unsurprisingly for many, the main reason is that projects are IT led rather than by the business.

However this is not an IT problem, it’s a business problem. It is the business who has failed to engage with, or properly understand, the project and it is the business who has misaligned their strategy and processes.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology with strategic implications. Absolutely IT must play a significant part in any implementation but to achieve a truly transformational change to your bottom line, profits and customer experience the business must be in the driving seat.

So, how does the business become, and stay, engaged in such an important initiative? How to stop RPA failure?

Business benefits

RPA, in its simplest form, takes on many manual and repetitive tasks currently performed by humans.

More sophisticated RPA implementations can start to pick up more value adding work, often between multiple systems, where humans are performing manual interface activities such as moving data from one system to another. This is especially true when augmented with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Typically RPA should only be applied to parts of the process, significantly speeding it up and reducing errors. Very few full end-to-end processes are suitable for implementation of RPA.

Not investigating and entirely understanding your processes means potentially you are pushing the problem further along. The bottom line is that while RPA may have improved one part of the process, the rest continues to consume as much time and resources leading to little or no business benefit.

It is essential that the business leads the effort to understand the end-to-end business process. They must identify the parts most suitable for RPA and understand the impact on the rest of the process. Only this will ensure that a real and measurable improvement can be produced.

Business priorities

The old adage “when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” is common when any new and disruptive technology comes along and RPA is no exception. Once you start to look at your business through the RPA lense you’ll quickly identify many potential opportunities.

The key is, as above, to try and identify the true business benefits. It doesn’t have to be time consuming. The days of long discovery and analysis phases are coming to an end with the advent of new software tools such as Skore’s Process Improvement platform. This capture and analysis of end-to-end processes takes a fraction of the time compared to traditional ways.

This means the business can quickly understand the potential business benefits across multiple processes allowing a comparison and prioritisation of opportunities.

Once benefits are understood in terms of time and cost savings they can be compared to strategic business priorities to ensure that your RPA initiatives are clearly aligned to your business strategy.

How to stop RPA failure
Image taken from Skore’s Robotic Assess Module

Support for IT

IT will play a critical role in the success of any project.

To support IT ensure they have the necessary budget to deliver the expected benefits. Essentially however, they must also have access to the business expertise to ensure they can build the right solution.

Any work carried out to understand the processes and quantify the benefits should include representatives from IT. This means they are engaged early and fully understand the context of what you are asking them to provide. It will go a long way to preventing unexpected problems cropping up later in the project or after going live.

Conclusion

RPA promises to transform many businesses with rapid deployment, speed of operation and quality of output. However applied in the wrong place with the wrong motives it can quickly turn into an expensive project with no tangible benefits.

Follow our tips on how to stop RPA failure:

  • RPA projects should be led by the business to deliver tangible business benefits aligned with strategic priorities
  • Processes need to be understood holistically and the impact on non-automated parts properly understood – investment in this stage is vital
  • Keep IT engaged throughout to ensure everyone is fully aligned

Find out more about how Skore and how our analytics could help your business identify the right processes for automation. Skore’s software platform builds a prioritised portfolio of RPA opportunities based on robust ROI analysis. It was designed with a simple two shape system which means everyone in the organisation can understand and share processes.

Learn more about how Process Improvement can transform your business by accessing our resources here

Statistics taken from Ernst and Young’s recent report ‘Get Ready for Robots’ available here  https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Get_ready_for_robots/$FILE/ey-get-ready-for-robots.pdf

Go ahead and ask the obvious questions

You’ll probably save your business a significant amount of money!

This weekend we suffered a rare power outage at home. After checking the electricity, making sure all the switches were still on and no fuses had tripped us out, I concluded it must be a power cut. With candles and torches at the ready in case we were still powerless by nightfall, we settled down with the kids to play board games!

After an hour or two, I decided to check with our immediate neighbours, an older couple, they too were out of power. However, as the sun went down we spotted that one of the other neighbours had their lights on. Time to investigate!

It tuned out that only a handful of houses in the street were affected by the power cut. What’s more, nobody had actually called the electricity company to report it! Once we realised this, the call was made, an engineer was onsite within an hour and a temporary fix got us up and running.

The point being, as a collective, we all assumed that someone else would have reported the outage – but no one actually had!

How often does this sort of thing happen in your business?

Think of your IT team as the electricity company in our power outage. Everyone in your business expects them to come and fix problems when they occur. But what if nobody has told them there is a problem to fix?

On a recent project, the client complained that their IT system couldn’t record vital information. Instead they were documenting it manually in a spreadsheet which was then attached to a record. As you can imagine, this took a lot of extra time and made accurately reporting that data, really quite tedious.

Another example, for a different client, found a one team using a HR system which didn’t afford them the necessary access rights to record key information. As a result, they had devised an elaborate (and time consuming) workaround. Personal information was typed into a notes field, a screen shot was taken of the record and the information was deleted from the notes field. The screenshot was added to a password protected file that was, eventually, uploaded against the employee’s record. A lengthy, frustrating, not to mention costly, exercise which staff completed with a sigh of…

“If only the system did this in a better way”.

(As an aside I bet you’ve either heard that said in your organisation or said it yourself!).

What both these scenarios have in common is that the affected teams assumed that the IT team knew there was a problem and couldn’t do anything to help.

In actual fact, further investigations revealed that, in the first case nobody had asked for the additional fields to be added to the system. In the second case, again, no ticket had ever been raised requesting a change to access rights for the specific record type.

It was during the Skore discovery exercise, that these issues were quickly identified. And because the Skore approach is so effective at communicating across different domains, for example between the operational part of the business and the IT team, the IT team quickly recognised what the problem was AND the pain it was causing for users.

What’s more, in both cases the IT Teams were surprised, and almost apologetic, that the users had been putting up with the issues for so long. Cases were raised, fixes implemented relatively quickly, and life was made easier for everyone.

Based on these example, I have a challenge for you. Think about how many issues you deal with, on a daily basis, that are just SO obvious you assume either someone else will fix it, or that there is no fix? Then find out, what is being done to fix them.

The chances are the right people haven’t even been told about it. No wonder nothing has happened!

Digital Transformation in Construction – Keep it Simple

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is on the mind of every leadership team across all industries, not just construction. But what is digital transformation? A search online will return mountains of articles, research, opinion pieces and many more all describing wildly different descriptions.

You’ll hear about the customer journey, digital first interactions, reducing friction etc. A lot of what you read about will be from the retail industry or finance, disruptive business models and so on.

From a construction perspective how do you make sense of this all?

Digital transformation in construction

Today digital transformation is relative and depend on your industry as a whole and where it sits in relation to digital. It is about where you are today, your starting point, where you are trying to get to and how you can use digital technology to get there. In essence it’s about improving productivity, profitability, experience, automation and, perhaps most importantly, innovation.

In that sense it’s no different from any sort of industrial improvement technique that has come before. Except now the pace of change in digital technologies is so high that you need a new capability in your business that can keep on top of it and continuously implement the latest innovations.

Back to basics

For construction it will come as little surprise to most in the industry that things still tend to happen largely on spreadsheets. Even basic task automation found in other industries will be completed on spreadsheets and shared via email in construction. Files are still stored on shared drives and approvals are made with wet signatures.

Given this starting point I’d urge anyone considering digital transformation in the construction industry to not get carried away and take advantage of the enormous opportunities for improvement right in front of them.

Tools for creating simple workflows, with approvals, controlled document storage and mobile friendly are readily available and easy to use. More traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools are easier to use and easier to configure than ever before. Most tools nowadays include some sort of Application Programming Interface (API) that allows it to connect to a variety of other tools so you can reduce data entry and emails.

However, given how easy to use and accessible these tools are it’s very easy to implement the wrong thing in the wrong way. And that’s where this new capability comes in.
Digital Discovery for digital transformation

Creating, or configuring, automated workflows may seem easy, but to do so in a scalable and future proof way requires a bit more skill. It’s important to consider the wider business to understand how this new workflow fits in. What are the inputs required, what outputs are expected, who will do it, what is the escalation path when something goes wrong, what is the data model required, who else needs to know?

Using a digital discovery tool such as Skore will make this much easier. It will allow you to rapidly build a model that describes how your business works, where the gaps are and answer the questions above. You can use this model to build and test your new automated workflows before you roll them out to your team.

Infact digital discovery is best started before you’ve even selected a technology for your transformation. The model produced will form the requirements for that system and can be used in the vendor selection process. Simply take the model to the different vendors and ask them to show you how they would deliver it.

Successful digital transformation

In construction, successful digital transformation is all about being aware of your starting point. Don’t try to over think things, or build something that no one would recognise. Keep it simple, identify the things that can be easily automated today that will have the largest impact on the business.

There is a lot you can do right now to reduce risk and increase productivity, simply by getting rid of those spreadsheets.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you on your digital transformation journey please get in touch.

Historian or Visionary… Which are you?

This blog article was updated on 8th August 2019

Buying a house may be an emotional rollercoaster but for the Construction industry itself there are just as many highs and lows.

Customer expectations mean organisations must look at improving customer experience and sales management if they want to survive. It’s not just sales data that will make the difference but the way the organisation harmonises and coordinates its processes.

The construction industry is changing.

If you’re in the business of selling new homes, you will be acutely aware of how changes in consumer expectations within the retail sector, are now reflected in the expectations of home buyers. Consumers are no longer willing to ‘hope’ for a good experience, it is expected and public interest means complaints are well documented and publicised.

Yet despite this sales teams are still often relying on backward looking metrics to measure success and manage customer experience: 

Number of completions, revenue and profit are all important measures, but they can only be measured AFTER the event.

At the other end of the sales process is the opportunity pipeline containing potential buyers who have shown a real interest and ‘qualify’ as an opportunity. Sales targets may often be calculated on this and the historical sales data.

Reflect on the past but FIX the future

What neither of these actually do, is measure anything which might predict if something is about to go wrong during the sales cycle. For most organisations the first indication is typically when the buyer raises an objection, or it becomes clear the build won’t be delivered on time. By now the damage is done, it’s too late to mitigate the issue and your only option is to try and appease your buyer. How much better would the experience be for all if this could be predicted?

Revolutionise your processes to transform your customer experience

So how can you move from Historian to Visionary and identify measures that will tell you when something might go wrong before it does? 

The build process is complex and, typically, out of control of the sales team. However, having an integrated, end-to-end view of the whole process allows everyone, including your sales team, to see the key stages along the way.

How can your organisation sense and respond to potential issues, address them early and provide a better customer experience throughout the process?

Organisations should be building an integrated model in a way that is easy for everyone to follow and understand. By bringing different but related teams together organisations can clarify who does what and when key handovers of responsibility occur. Skore’s Digital Discovery Platform ensures the whole process is transparent and can identify points of critical, mutual communication. This is when the change will happen. The points where potential issues in the build process should be communicated to the sales team early enough for them to do something about it, before the customer experience fails. 

Image taken from Skore’s Digital Discovery Platform

Measure what matters

In addition it is important to focus on the value added by each step of a process. These are the steps which often make great performance measurement points as they occur throughout the process and not just at the end. 

Identifying and measuring indicators of success throughout the process means that you look to the future outcomes much sooner.

Using this approach, when certain parts of the process aren’t delivering as expected, means these measures will act as an early warning of a potential problems. These can be investigated and resolved and gives the sales team a heads up to communicate with the customer and manage their expectations.

The Skore Digital Discovery Platform enables you to map processes, deliver instant insights and identify process improvements. A live workshop tool it encourages collaboration and sharing within teams. It’s easy to use interface and reporting functions produce eye catching and informative dashboards and reports to easily measure, distribute and value your business processes. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use Skore to build a sense and respond organisation and deliver a better customer experience, get in touch.

Understand the root cause of your Communication Failures with Process Mapping

This blog article was last updated on 22nd October 2019

If your relationship between head office and the business is causing problems then perhaps it is time to go back to basics and rediscover your processes. Solving Communication failures with process mapping allows you to listen to your organisation and engage with the people who enable your business.

Communication Issues

Often we hear it in a shop where the stock levels are inconsistent. Or by a service provider where the member of staff isn’t empowered to make the changes that would improve customer experiences?

“WE KNOW THIS DOESN’T WORK WELL BUT HEAD OFFICE MAKE THE RULES AND DON’T LISTEN TO US”

In fact, communication breakdowns aren’t just restricted to multi-site businesses. The problem can easily happen between teams on the same site. Or between the business and its suppliers and/or customers.

It’s a frequent factor in companies that are growing rapidly, where each team is focused on a specific objective or companies that haven’t changed in a long time even though the environment around them has.

When communication breaks down, or is perceived to have broken down, the result is a duplication of effort, rework, mistakes and a general lack of trust. All in all, not a recipe for a high performing business.However before you jump ahead and start looking at which of the many available solutions you are going to use to improve collaboration, and therefore communication, STOP! Look into solving your communications failures with process mapping.

It is critical that you understand the root cause of the problem first. Once you have done this, the solution may be far simpler, and therefore less expensive to implement, than it initially appears.

Finding a solution

A recent Skore client had two teams doing the work that really belonged to one. Team A was the rightful owner of the work yet nearly 50% of it was done by Team B.

Team B weren’t properly trained in the task and lacked time. When things went wrong, Team A often got the blame. In addition there was duplication.

When Skore was engaged trust was at dangerously low levels and adversely impacting their effectiveness. The first step was to map out the end to end work that both teams were doing.

Using a simple approach, the teams described the key activities, who owned them and the value each activity brought to the process.

These sessions were immensely powerful in stripping out any emotion attached to the inter-team relationships and allowed everyone to describe the work as it should be done. As the steps and interactions were captured, ownership was clarified as was, more importantly, the key interfaces and what was expected of each team.

communication failures with process mapping
Image taken from Skore’s Digital Discovery Platform

Communication is key

The client had initially engaged Skore to help them capture requirements for an upgrade to one of their systems. A change that would alter the way aspects of their business processes worked. Using Skore enabled them to capture the necessary requirements, realign the teams’ processes, roles and responsibilities

More importantly it demonstrated to them the value of allowing employees the time to go back to basics, to understand their roles/responsibilities and others and then collectively to start the healing process. Positive and effective communication grows from understanding and trust, when that is lacking no manner of communication tools will solve the situation. 

Using the Skore approach it is common to identify hidden problems in a business. Once a problem is identified you’re halfway to a solution. However, when people are unable to articulate the problem, can’t see the root cause clearly, or aren’t empowered to challenge, problems will often be put down to communication and trust issues. In turn this can lead to accusations of poor workmanship when in fact it’s simply a broken process

Skore Digital Discovery is a process mapping, improvements and insights software platform. With live workshop functionality it enables you to engage with your employees instantly and provides a lasting interactive record of your people, processes and tools.

Asking WHY can save your business a fortune!

As a consultant, one of the most powerful questions in my ‘toolbox’ is “why”?

Why do you do that? What’s the value?

It forces you to think beyond the superficial and dig into the real meaning of a piece of work. To understand what it ultimately adds to your business or customer.

It’s easy for me, to turn up at a new client’s premises and ask those questions. But why don’t businesses ask it enough of themselves?

What do you do to ensure you constantly challenge yourself and every person in your organisation, to consider the value in all that they do?

Asking ‘WHY’ is a great example of how the Skore approach consistently helps businesses using it, stay at the top of their game. It challenges team members at all levels within a business, to think about what they do and why. To always challenge the status quo and ask;

  • What value is this process adding to the customer?
  • How does each step contribute to that value?

When I am training clients teams on using the Skore approach, I often find the following anecdote highlights the importance of asking WHY.

Several years ago, I was working with a large construction and services company helping them define a standard process for a back-office function. A mundane but necessary step in their wider improvement programme.

In one session we started by capturing all the key steps in the process. These were displayed, in the order that they happened, on the screen for everyone to see. The room was full of heads nodding in agreement. A great start!

I then started to walk the team through each step, asking “why does this step happen?” or “what value does this step bring?”. As we moved through the steps it generated some great discussion and opened up a whole bunch of improvement ideas for the future. Ideas I duly captured and shared with the client team later.

Eventually we arrived at this innocuous step “produce weekly reports”. Again, I asked the question, “why do we do this?”. The team turned to look at the person who had described the step. “So that the weekly reports are produced?” was the response.

Hearing the past tense used to describe why something is done often rings alarm bells to me as it usually suggests that there’s little, or worse, no value in the activity. It’s hard to articulate, and isn’t always the case, but is a pretty good indicator that we need to try a little harder to uncover the value. I tried again, this time “OK, what do you do with the report once you’ve produced it?”

“Print it out and file it in the cabinet at the end of the office” came the reply. At this point the colleagues all looked at each other. My next question, “does anyone use that report?” was met with a sea of blank faces.

After investigation it transpired that this person was spending three hours every week producing these reports. The reports were filed away and never looked at. What’s more, we found no compliance reason for them to exist.

It turns out that when the colleague had joined the organisation 18 months before, their predecessor had included this activity as part of their job handover.

In that time over 210 hours had been wasted and if we hadn’t caught it, many more would have followed!

Through the application of the Skore approach, the identification of these types, and levels, of waste are commonplace.

Traditional methods of process improvement require a high level of discipline to apply it correctly, or alternatively, for a consultant to come in and do it. The more commonly used approaches to capturing and visualising ways of working don’t generally ask “why” at each step and therefore improvement opportunities, such as those described above, are easily missed.

It is for this reason that we built the “why” questions directly into the Skore platform.

When Skore is used to define and describe work processes it routinely asks;

  • What happens?
  • Who does it? and
  • Why?

If the questions are not answered, they remain visible until the are completed, acting as a reminder to investigate and understand them fully at some later point during the process.

Want to learn more about Skore? Request a Demo today!

Don’t let hidden costs damage your profits

When a business is embarking on a project, that will fundamentally change the way the organisation works, there are a number of steps to go through in order to properly identify the business aspirations and to understand exactly how change will impact the business. But these projects don’t tend to focus on finding hidden costs.

Typically, when the Skore team are called in to support this type of transformation project, our client will already have a specific goal, such as implementing a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

As a client you will have acknowledged that you have recurring problems, often including; the duplication of effort, repeatedly making the same mistakes, or simply not being able to keep on top of things with your existing working practices. But what other hidden costs might be lurking in the business?

Perhaps the system being implemented promises a new feature that will allow you to exploit a new process – for example, a client recently benefited from the introduction of an online chat widget, meaning that customers were able to interact directly with the support staff through the website.

In 2017, we published this article How we saved 80 days of waste during a system implementation. This project saw our client, a tier 1 engineering company, implementing a training administration system to manage the multitude of internal and external training courses they offer.

With well defined goals for the system implementation, Skore was selected for gathering the requirements. During the early project stages of the initial requirements workshops, we quickly identified the aforementioned extra 80 days of hidden cost!

Using that article as the catalyst, we decided to review other projects we’ve been involved in and see what additional benefits we helped our clients achieve.

Another client engaged Skore to support the definition of business processes in preparation for the implementation of a new order processing system. During the definition phase, we once again identified a number of improvement opportunities outside the scope of the core project, including time savings in the processes for ordering, stock management and returns.

The Skore approach also helped the team identify areas where data duplication was taking place. By addressing these instances, further time efficiencies were achieved through the reduction of duplicated effort and rework.

In our third example, the project looked at the clients’ product development process. A key factor in using the Skore approach is the detailed understanding of the interactions between all interfacing processes, people and technology. It was within these interfaces our client identified additional pain points that were adversely impacting their customer experience. The additional value added by Skore was being able to assist with resolving these problems outside of the core project.

This is just a small sample of our projects. However, our ongoing review process found one common theme – that additional benefits are consistently being identified outside of the defined scope of our projects.

What is most surprising, is that in virtually all cases, these unexpected benefits represent a significant cost saving to the client despite never having previously been identified. In fact, the teams were often not even aware they had a problem until the Skore approach was applied.

This is why the use of Skore tends to grow within organisations. After its initial introduction as a tool to support the delivery of a specific project, its value in identifying additional, or unexpected, benefits soon becomes clear. Skore can easily be applied to other parts of the business in order to optimise working practices, reduce costs, identify new opportunities and, in turn, increase profits.

To find out more about how Skore is helping organisations transform their performance and customer satisfaction, take a look at our case studies.

Or, to discuss how Skore could be applied to your own business, leave your details for one of our transformation specialists to arrange a call.

10 Steps to the Perfect Process Map

This blog article was updated on 7th August 2019

Skore’s success as a software platform undoubtedly demonstrates it’s importance as part of the process capture solution. However our own experiences within the Skore team have also enabled us to master the ability to map out and analyse processes effectively.  We’d like to share with you our steps to creating a process map that will engage and inform your organisation. 

A simple structure and approach is the most effective. It will get you started, guide you, enable you to learn and build experience. That’s why Skore is based on a simple, yet powerfully flexible, framework for describing and aligning processes, people, systems and data.

Indeed Skore has the framework built in to it and it makes it quick and easy to apply. However underneath there is still a basic approach that underpins the application of the framework. After the numerous training and discovery sessions Skore have been involved in we’ve put together the following 10 simple steps to creating the perfect process map.

Need to learn more about Process Mapping? Try our guide here

So if you want to create good quality and insightful process maps for your organisation in 10 simple steps read our recommendations:.

10 STEPS TO THE PERFECT PROCESS MAP

1. SCOPE

Ask yourself – what is the scope for this process? Make sure you capture the title, initial input and final output

2. ACTIVITIES

What is the work to be done? You only need to record the verb and noun for each activities, don’t worry about sequence at this stage or trying to write full sentences. Just get them all down.

3. OUTPUTS

For each activity, add the output – our tip is to try to avoid just putting the past tense of the activity, think about the now. 

4. FLOW

Only once all the activities have an output should you hook them up. What does this output trigger next? This checks you’ve got the right activities at the right stage of the process. You may be surprised at this stage how many people may disagree with you.

5. WHO

A process is never complete until the ‘Who does it?’ is filled in for EVERY activity. For higher levels, who is responsible? For lower levels, who does it? Again this is a very enlightening exercise for the whole team. 

6. ENRICH

Add in things like systems, data, document links, requirements, etc… depending on the reason you’re process mapping. Make sure these are captured in the software to show reach and priorities.

7. TIDY

Remember this process is for all and you want it to be visually pleasing. Align the tops, space apart… a neat process is a happy process, and it’s pretty satisfying too. 

8. SHARE

Don’t keep the process to yourself, make sure the access rights are set up correctly and share the link to a wider audience. Switch on Comments if you want feedback directly. Allow your process map to become a community builder within your organisation. 

9. REFINE

Take the feedback and improve the process, update it. Look at the insights generated and use that information to clarify and hone your map. 

10. PUBLISH

Decide who should approve the process (usually the Process Owner!) and Publish. Remember, this is just a line in the sand, it will change and need to be re-published. You can always roll back to an earlier version if needs be so don’t be reluctant. A process map is only a useful tool if seen and shared by those who need to. 

The Skore Digital Discovery Platform is a process mapping, improvement and insights platform. Live workshop functionality, instant updating and shareable, it enables you to align your people, processes and tools. Find out more here

The Magic of Hierarchy

The importance of hierarchy

Probably my favourite tool in the arsenal of analyst techniques has to be decomposition. Whether it’s functional or process decomposition there is nothing like it for arranging problems into the big picture. Then breaking that picture down into its component parts so that you can start to make sense of it.

And yet hierarchy, in recent years, has got a pretty bad reputation. As Stanford professor Bob Sutton wrote this weekend in this LinkedIn article. He was brought up to believe that hierarchy was bad and led to inefficiency, yet research for his new book showed that hierarchy is unavoidable.

Hierarchy is nature’s gift to us in helping us understand the World around us. Citing research by his colleagues Deb Gruenfeld and Lara Tiedens he describes how hierarchy is found in every single group of animals found in nature. To quote Gruenfeld and Tiedens directly:

“When scholars attempt to find an organization that is not characterized by hierarchy, they cannot.”

Hierarchy structures the relationships between people and things into parent, child and peer relationships. This makes it easier for us to remember those relationships, it provides an organising principle that is standardised across everything. We simply have to know how hierarchy works in order to understand something that is new to us.

This is what makes decomposition so powerful. It comes naturally to us human beings so is not really something that needs much in the way of education. When we apply it, it’s often to an area that seems chaotic and complex. By decomposing we overlay a hierarchy that allows us to understand what was previously incomprehensible. It allows us to break problems down into component parts in order to tackle them effectively and even start to predict what will happen when we make changes.

It doesn’t just aid understanding, it also helps us to remember. Instead of having to remember every single discreet component of an organisation you simply need to remember a small subset. You can then use this along with the hierarchical organising principle and you will be able to fairly accurately calculate the missing pieces.

Skore and decomposition

This is what makes decomposition one of the first things I do when introduced to a new problem and this is why we made decomposition one of the central parts of Skore. It surprises me how few products there are out there that help you do this easily, one of our favourites is Workflowy.

Right from the beginning we wanted to give people the ability to decompose as thought it was second nature. With Skore you simply capture a few high level actions that describe the ‘big picture’ then use the details button on each What Box to decompose to the next level creating a hierarchy as you go. This means it is really important that you complete the Why Box for each step. The Why Box is used to determine the outcome of each step, what’s expected once the action is complete. By doing this consistently you are setting your scope for the next level of detail and making it easier to focus on that detail.

Detail button on a What Box in Skore

When looking at any new problem Skore is one of the first tools I reach for, sketch out the big picture and then explore the details of any relevant parts.

3 things to remember

Hierarchy is all around us – it is an organising principle built into nature and helps us understand otherwise complex situations.

Use decomposition to organise and understand problems – start at the ‘big picture’ and break it down into component parts in order to understand what it is and what to do next.

Use the Details button in Skore to decompose a step – each What Box has a details button, clicking this will give you a clean canvas with the context of the parent step including the descriptions of the What and Why boxes. You can break individual steps into detail views as often as you need until you reach the right level of detail.

This is an extended version of an article from Human Automation.

Learn more about hierarchical process mapping in our Process Mapping Guide.

Bringing RACI Modelling into the 21st Century

This blog was updated on 15th October 2022 this blog we discuss what RACI Modelling is, some of the issues around using it in an organisation and how using a visual modelling platform helps.

What is RACI?

The objective of RACI is to be a tool to help teams clarify roles and responsibilities. However despite the popularity of this model often organisations struggle to define and manipulate the data it creates.

RACI stands for:

  • Responsible – the person responsible for doing the work
  • Accountable – the person ultimately accountable for the delivery of the work
  • Consult – A person that needs to be consulted during the work
  • Inform – A person that needs to know about the work

It’s typically used in a matrix form with roles along the top which can be cross referenced against activities down the side.

There are many alternatives

The concept behind RACI is sound, the idea that it should provide clarity around who does what in a project or process. However there are many different variations on the theme such as:

  • ARCI
  • RASI
  • RACIQ
  • RACIO
  • RATSI (our favourite)
  • RAPID
  • RACSI
  • DACI
  • CLAM

Each of these appear to be attempts to clarify and improve the definitions of each component. Some have a different focus such as on decision making or outcomes.

The problem with RACI

One of the biggest criticisms of RACI is that it can be vague. For example the defining the difference between Responsible and Accountable.

Using RACI can mean a lack of consistency around activities and level of involvement expected from different roles. Getting the level of detail right is difficult, too detailed and you don’t allow flexibility for the team to make their own decisions. Not enough detail and there is too much open to interpretation. This leaves you unclear over processes and who is responsible for what. 

RACI also doesn’t describe outcomes, it’s focus is only on activity. However including outcomes can provide more precision around the work required and further certainty on the difference between the person doing the work and the person owning the outcome or deliverable.

Finally, a major problem with RACI, and similar models, is that the resulting documentation (typically a matrix in a spreadsheet) is just too big and complex to be used and understood to those that need it.

Get In Touch

Introducing visual RACI modelling

At Skore we have created a form of responsibility modelling based on our process framework approach. This combines the definition of activities, outcomes and roles into a single picture.

Image of a Skore Process

This means, you can, at one glance, see the work required, how it flows, the outcomes expected at each step and the responsibility level. 

The framework makes it’s very easy to take each of those activities and break them down into more detail as required. 

When you reach the lowest level of detail you can add as many roles as you need to each activity. You can choose to show these on the diagram or you can hide them in the responsibilities panel to keep the diagram clean and simple.

Image taken from the Skore Platform

This information is available to any user that needs to see it and is easily searchable by any user with the correct access rights.

RACI reporting and analysis

Defining activities, roles and responsibilities in a clear and visual way is an excellent way to get clarity among the team. Not just when you first gather the information but also as an ongoing asset, or reference tool, for the team in the future too.

Using Skore instantly provides additional insights you simply wouldn’t see if you were using a spreadsheet.

With the click of a button you can view a tabular report showing the activities, roles and their RACI assignment.

Role descriptions with RACI attributes

Using this data you can quickly create graphs that highlight patterns and help you focus your analysis and improvement activities.

Skore Graph

Finally Skore provides instant job descriptions based on your RACI modelling. Clicking on the name of a role will show all the activities in that role and their RACI assignments. Ideal for exporting into job descriptions.

Skore Role Description

If you’d like to try Skore for yourself and experience how to use RACI the right way, get in touch.

Get In Touch

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