How does Role Modeling:
 | resolve issues and build strong collaborations:
Separate the person from the problem (as in Getting to Yes by Fisher and Ury).
Role Modeling keeps focus on collaboratively creating well-designed/understood roles and
their needed interactions before binding them to jobs, tasks and people. |
| instill a vested sense of responsibility: Models
are built by representatives of the organizations being modeled. The role-playing involved
in modeling always keeps a question in focus: "If I had to perform this Role as
presently defined, would I have the right authority, information, resources and
collaborations to perform it well?" |
| simplify project management: Interposing the
concept of role between that of task and resource gives greater clarity and flexibility to
project management and its supporting software. For example, when an individual is taken
ill, some of the individual's roles must be temporarily reassigned while others can wait
until the individual returns. The reassigned roles need not all go to the same person.
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| measure and track: Enterprise goals rarely have
much meaning at the level of individual workers. How do you roll up each individual's
contribution to profitability or customer satisfaction? You can't. It is foolish to think
you can. Simply allocating rewards and penalties by headcount or salary gives none of the
insight, accountability or control needed to actually foster the desired outcomes. The
responsibility boundaries associated with Roles provide a meaningful way to track
accountability. A Role is measured and rewarded according to the agreements it has with
its stakeholders. It may use entirely different measures in the agreements it has with its
collaborators and suppliers. The difference makes every measurement meaningful in its own
context. The Role takes responsibility for bridging the differences in meaning. So someone
may be the czar of customer satisfaction and be rewarded based on the outcome of
satisfaction surveys, but that person may enter into agreements with various other
managers based on measurements such as call response times, in the case of customer
service, or equipment reliability, in the case of engineering. |
| respond rapidly: Because of the
cohesiveness of the requirements whcih a role must handle, changes in requirements tend to
involve relatively few Roles. The collaborations shown in the model simplify the process
of tracking the impact of a change. Change can occur as soon as the agreement can be
reached by the involved stakeholders. |
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