3 Difficulties of Assigning Roles and Responsibilities Without RATSI

26th February 2024

by Colin Claverie

What is the one thing you need for your business processes to run smoothly?

An awareness of who is responsible for what and when, in your processes.

In other words, clearly defined roles in the process and their associated responsibilities.

We made a point to include this important aspect of business process mapping in our Liberty Spark platform via the RATSI framework, which is a bit different from RACI. It stands for assigning the responsibilities based on:

• Responsible – Who is the person making sure the activity is done satisfactorily enough to move on to the next part of the process – typically a manager or director figure
• Authority – Ultimately, who oversees the activity or decision should anything need to be elevated – usually not the everyday worker, more of an executive or manager
• Task – Who is actually doing the activity, the everyday frontline worker
• Support – A support figure who can provide input in exceptional situations, for example, a subject matter expert (SME) being invited to a sales call to support the sales team
• Informed – Someone who is informed when an activity or task is completed, whether successfully or not – most likely someone that is part of your analytics team.

The reason why we focus so heavily on roles and responsibilities in our platform is that if it’s not done properly, organisations suffer.

Let’s take a look at why.

Difficulty 1: Accepting sign off

One of the most common causes of a business process bottleneck: Signing off can sometimes end up being a game of hot potato when it comes to responsibilities. And it can be what slows everything down.

If it’s at all unclear who is responsible for what activity in your process, things can come to a standstill. And your business will suffer for it.

Clarity in signing off and the associated steps,  are essential. They need to be incorporated into your process as soon as possible. Liberty Spark, our process improvement solution,  makes it easy for you to do so.

Each of our activity boxes has a Who? space at the bottom of the box to assign the correct title to the activity. Next to each title, you can also assign a RATSI (or any other responsibility matrix) letter, to indicate the type of role they have within the process. This helps to ensure that it makes sense and that several bases are covered as needed per task.

Also, each title, or role, has a set of responsibilities and activities that align with the activity. These are is easily visible, either when you’re building the process, analysing it for improvement, or studying it as part of training. Without a RATSI framework, knowing who is in charge of moving the process along via approval can be extremely difficult to pinpoint.

Other forms of mapping such as swim lane diagrams or flowcharts do not place as much importance on the visualisation of the responsible role for each process task. This is because they were not created with business process mapping in mind.

For business processes to move along, certain roles must be made responsible for particular tasks. Otherwise, people are difficult to pin down and could refuse responsibility for a process step, slowing everything down and affecting your efficiency as a company. Understanding the responsibilities of a role and transparently communicating them in a map is a necessity for business processes to run smoothly.

When building Spark, we recognised this limitation in other forms of mapping and sought to fix it. This is why we use Universal Process Notation (UPN) to avoid confusion, and why we employ the RATSI matrix. You cannot shirk responsibilities when they are clearly shown next to your role and your role is highlighted as responsible for a necessary task to move the entire process along.

If you don’t use Spark or our notation or matrixes, you are most likely struggling with obtaining approval and being slower than you could be.

Difficulty 2: Required compliance and risk overviews

With the rising need for compliance and risk overviews within many industries, it is imperative that a business knows who is responsible for ensuring that they fall within the correct guidelines.

Any slowdown or uncertainty whether the necessary steps are being taken, negatively impacts every business.  If you’re in tech, where everything moves fast, you’re probably feeling this heavily right now.

Cybersecurity has never been more crucial, with new regulatory standards to adhere to constantly. The amount of changes you make to comply with new standards to mitigate risk, and the speed at which you are trying to make them, is probably new to you. But it may also be slowing you down significantly.

With new measures, your teams may be unsure who is responsible for approval, or the responsible party may be difficult to track down. Especially if your processes aren’t mapped and available to relevant team members.

Here’s a worst-case scenario example,  in a food and beverage organisation, time wasted without having a clear idea of whether you are complying with laws can actually lead to perishable products being lost. And of course, this results in a significant loss of revenue. Simply because you didn’t know who was in charge of the risk and compliance overview.

With RATSI and Spark, you can move past this concern.

Workers can refer to a process map and find who the correct role should be for approval in this situation. Even when things are changing fast, extrapolating the information as you build a process is quick, based on their existing tasks and the RATSI matrix.

If you’re unsure, you can also utilise our Quantify tool, to study who is approving the quickest in different areas and plan your process accordingly.

Above all, transparency regarding responsibility is key when workers must find the right approval for risk and compliance changes.

Difficulty 3: Knowledge retention

Finally, without RATSI, knowledge retention becomes practically impossible.

Our customers have greatly benefited from this aspect of Spark over time, and it is why we have written so much about the importance of process libraries.

Employees come and go, and processes can change. Throughout this, it is imperative for a business to hold on to all the information. Without information on how a process is being done currently, it becomes impossible to analyse processes for improvement and train new hires.

But even that becomes difficult if RATSI is not implemented and used by the organisation.

RATSI allows roles and responsibilities to be assigned thanks to a pre-determined matrix, and Spark has simplified it even further so that the role is the focus, and its particular capability is highlighted.

If you are studying a process map to improve or optimise it, or you are preparing to train new hires, you need to know what role has what responsibility within the process. New hires can then learn who to ask for help, and you know who you can ask for further details on a process if you’re looking to make positive changes.

Additionally, it helps to keep the knowledge within the company and be passed down, and potentially duplicated if the company grows.

Without RATSI, you only end up with half the information you need to truly improve or train.

Role clarity

Assigning roles and responsibilities is a key component of any business. It’s especially important when it comes to business processes, since if you don’t know the correct person to turn to for questions or approvals, a process will stall.

We recognised this importance, and so when we built in Liberty Spark, roles were incorporated directly into the mapping process.

Spark focused on UPN because it conveys the importance of a role for an overall process to be as efficient as possible. And to recognise this and improve on it, we recommend the RATSI matrix.

Without it, knowledge of who does what becomes a bit more difficult than it needs to be.

If you’re looking to speed up approval times or fully understand who is responsible for what in your company, you’ve come to the right place.

Our team is ready to help you gain control of your business processes, simply get in touch