Building Business Systems: Identifying Departments, Responsibilities, & Roles

Department roles and responsibilities chart, firstly is not an organisation chart. If you have who's got an organization chart, great. If you've got one of those, that'll make this process really, really easy. If you don't have one of those in place, that's okay. Going through this process will also help you when you do create one. But it is not an organizational chart. Here the objective is to identify and create responsibility around who should be owning these systems and processes. So you can have a look at those pages that I mentioned. The first step that we need to go through is thinking about your departments. So try and break your business up. There are some examples. There's the one on the screen. There's also, if you look at page number three, there's some departments there. Don't get too caught up on what they are. If you look up to the screen here at the moment, I've got operations and finance joined together. Magic. They're now separate. So if you want to have multiple departments or you go, hey, one of the departments Dave mentioned here isn't, I've got an administrative department. And it's not mentioned up there. That's okay. You can add that in the goal of what we're looking to do and you can copy mine as best as you can. We just want to transfer what you identify in the critical client flow through to this sheet. So if you've got your critical client flow handy and you can swap backwards and forwards, you start off. Step number one is defining the departments within your business. Sales, marketing, hr, whatever it is, and you just scribble those across the top. Step number two is you then think about the responsibilities associated to those departments only from the critical client flow. Because the objective here is to the exclusion of everything else, we're going to focus on just getting the critical client flow documented. Because we know by getting that documented that makes us money like it's a central product or service. So we focus on that just to start. So we start to break up that critical client flow and put the names of those boxes into and under different departments. And then we move to the final stage. Step number three in the top line. We then need to start to think about who is the department head. So who handles that role most often, whether it's sales or marketing, Finance, who oversees operation. If you were to say one person is responsible, who would it be at that department head level? Ideally, you really only need one name in there. Try and avoid having two. We need someone to take responsibility and say that this is my baby. Otherwise no one ends up taking responsibility. You can. Underneath that, you can do a second line of secondary people. Depending on the size of your team, it's a good idea to have your second line of defense in every business you want to build in redundancy. So if someone's sick, you still have someone trained up who can step in. And then finally, you put your knowledgeable workers. You don't need to put your entire team here, just the team members who have specific knowledge on certain topics. So we identified SEO as one of the things that we do to drive traffic through to our website. You know, we create blog posts and things like that. Our knowledgeable worker for that particular role is Grace. So she appears on the sheet. So that way we just start to think about who has this knowledge that we can then work with them to extract it and out of their head. Just one thing to keep in mind as well. I might as well leave that one up because I'll get you to just scribble it out a little bit on that example is where you can, again, depending on the size of your team, avoid putting the business owner or the visionary as department heads. Ideally, you should be operating outside of the organization. You don't want that business owner filling a role. Sam.