Category: Business Performance

Looking for a new way to describe roles and responsibilities (R&R)? It is one of the core benefits of process mapping and the most common approach is often RACI analysis. However at Skore we recommend a clearer approach – RATSI.  We’ll take a look at how RATSI works and why we think it is so much better as an alternative plus you can download our guide to getting started with using RATSI.

Identifying responsibilities – Why is it important.

Firstly let’s look at the reasons why you need to identify responsibilities when looking at Process Improvement. 

You will always need to know who will be involved in a piece of work and what is expected from them. This is about role clarity and setting the right expectations for every member of the team. Capturing roles and responsibilities allows a process to remain high level while still gathering all the elements involved.

The Problem with RACI 

RACI has been most popular notation for R&R analysis but we find it falls short of being as clear as it should be.

RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. The problem is that in reality everyone has their own definition and understanding of what each of these terms means. If you’ve had experience of using RACI – you may have even argued with colleagues over the difference between Responsible and Accountable.

It is also true that in many languages “Accountability” translates literally to “Responsibility”. In the world of global business this lack of clarity can lead to a lot of mistakes or confusion. In comparison RATSI does not use this concept of “Accountability” at all.

Instead it uses :

• Authority over the work (but is not involved) and decision maker
• Responsibility for ensuring that the work is done.

What is RATSI?

RATSI stands for:

• Authority – “owns” the activity or the decision to be made. Clearly not involved in the day to day work.
• Responsible – for ensuring the activity is done (not necessarily doing the work but ensuring it is completed to an agreed standard).
• Task – actually does the work as described.
• Support – provides inputs in exceptional situations / edge cases (otherwise it would be Task).
• Informed – is informed the activity will happen / has been done (successfully or not!).

It is important to recognise that you can have more than one term assigned to you. In fact: someone could have Authority, Responsibility AND Task on a given activity!

RATSI – Understanding how to use the matrix.

Often people have questions over how to apply RATSI to their processes. Here are the answers to some of the common questions we see.

Can I have multiple Authorities or Responsibles for a given task?

You should aim for one unique Authority / Responsible per task. However if they don’t contradict each other you may have several on one activity. See this example:

In this example ‘Personal Care’ and ‘Home Care’ are 2 different business units that don’t approve the same campaign briefs. Therefore there is no conflict in the roles & responsibility.

When do I use Support vs. Task?

Try to consider if the person is involved in every occurrence of the process. If so then it should be Task. If you have any doubts then this is itself is often a good enough reason to “upgrade” it to a Task – remember you can always change it later. 

How many roles in total?

Finding the balance between a comprehensive list of roles and a process that is easy to read is challenging. It comes down to your personal preference. Take a look below:

Often when you see a long list of roles, actually its just variations of a given role. Keep your list of roles short by:

• Focusing on describing the process clearly
• Prioritising the Responsible.
• Writing a “generic” role for the Task

In the Skore platform, you could write the complete list in a ‘Sticky Note’, or an attachment, if you want to capture it separately from the activity thus keeping your process map clean and clear. 

3 things to remember with RATSI

• Role clarity is at the core of your process mapping exercise, whether it’s RATSI, RACI or your own variation, it’s important to understand who does what
• Limit the number of roles against an activity to keep the process readable
• Limit the number of Authority and Responsible to one where possible

Sound interesting? Get in touch to find out more about how to improve Roles and Responsibilities in your organisation. Skore is the cloud-based Process Improvement Software Platform designed to be used and understood by everyone in your organisation. You can use Skore with any R&R matrix you choose when capturing your processes.

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!

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.

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.

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.

What is Process Mapping?

Early on in my career as a consultant I remember explaining my new role to my Brother. “Process Mapping?” he replied, “I’ve had that done to me!”

He worked in the finance industry and told me that someone in the compliance team had called him. “We’ll be mapping your processes over the next month.” He was told.

“Six weeks later I received another call to tell me it had all been mapped!”

While this is, perhaps, an extreme case it demonstrates the lack of engagement typically found in process mapping exercises. Why is this important?

A lack of engagement is a symptom that demonstrates a lack on understanding as to what process mapping actually is. The term process mapping is often used to describe to act of documenting a process. However, here we argue that process documentation is only ONE of the outputs of a process mapping exercise. So what is Process Mapping?

Documenting versus mapping

I think of documenting a process as simply capturing what’s in front of you. You’re just documenting what you see. This is typically what happens when processes are captured through one-to-one interviews. The interviewee is explaining what they do and the analyst captures it. It’s one dimensional.

Mapping a process is more like mapping the landscape. You can see what’s in front of you but you can’t see what’s behind that distant hill. You don’t know if there’s a village, or a lake behind it. Mapping requires you to take many different perspectives to build up a model that describes the landscape.

In the same way process mapping is as much about documenting what isn’t obvious, or clear, to each person involved.

It could be argued that running process interviews with different stakeholders will give these perspectives. The problem is that there is little opportunity to challenge different perspectives. It’s left to the analyst to interpret conflicting views without understanding why they happen.

Process workshops

It’s for this reason we recommend live process mapping workshop as the best way to map a process. Participants can describe how things work together. Differences can be discussed and the reasons for these differences ascertained.

Differences in how work gets done typically develops organically and leads to duplication and loss of standardisation. Sometimes these differences are completely valid. It is very difficult for the analyst to identify which is which without the necessary debate generated in a workshop.

Of course one or two workshops won’t completely map the process. An ongoing engagement with the team is required to ensure process maps are kept up to date and relevant.

Keeping the process relevant

A recent customer explained how they use process maps at their weekly team meetings. “We always open the process and have it displayed on the screen while we talk about the week ahead.” She explained. “We are in a heavily regulated industry and operate across more than 100 countries. We have to fit new regulations into our ways of working on a weekly basis.”

“The process maps help us stick to a common language when we discuss the impact of each new regulation. It speeds up the implementation and reduces misunderstanding. It keeps us all on the same page during constant change.”

Processes are rarely changed but the maps ensure the team focus on the relevant area and are aligned on what to do.

Saving time

A further advantage of the process workshop approach is the time it saves. While each person in the room still needs to be taken out of the business the analyst mapping the process only needs to be there once.

When interviewing the analyst spends time with each participant individually. Then they must analyse the output of each interview and understand the differences, often getting agreement through additional meetings later.

Using Skore app further speeds things up as, unlike using sticky notes and whiteboards, processes can be mapped directly into the tool and shared at the end of the workshop. Therefore there’s no need to spend time mapping the process into a tool afterwards.

Process mapping is more than simply documenting a process in front of you. It’s about understanding the different perspectives that make up how that processes is run in a given organisation. It’s about understanding what isn’t obvious and why it happens. A good process map will be accepted by the roles it describes and will be used to continuously improve.

Contact us to learn more about how Skore app accelerates and improves process mapping.