Roles and responsibilities: writing them so people actually use them

A roles and responsibilities document exists to stop two specific failures: work nobody picked up because everyone assumed somebody else had, and decisions remade three times because it was never clear who owned them. Most versions fail because they describe job titles rather than activities — and nobody has ever resolved an argument about who approves a refund by reading a job title.

What roles and responsibilities should cover

• Activities, not titles: "approves purchases above the threshold" rather than "manages procurement".
• The decision owner for each activity, singular — shared ownership is the absence of ownership.
• Who does the work, who must be consulted, and who only needs telling afterwards.
• Thresholds and limits in numbers, because that is where disputes actually arise.
• Cover arrangements: who holds the responsibility when the owner is away.
• Escalation: what happens when the owner and a stakeholder disagree.
• A review date, since responsibilities drift faster than any other document in the organisation.

What to leave out

Aspirations and personality. Lines like "champions a culture of quality" cannot be allocated, audited or handed over, and their presence trains people to skim the document. Leave out anything you would not be willing to raise in a conversation about why something did not happen — that is a usable test, and applying it typically removes a third of a first draft.

Write it when nothing is on fire. A responsibilities document produced during an incident encodes that incident, and the allocation that made sense at two in the morning is rarely the one you want permanently.

Keeping it alive

1. List the twenty activities that actually matter, starting with the ones that have gone wrong.
2. Assign one decision owner each, and get that person to confirm it in their own words.
3. Mark the gaps honestly — activities with no owner are the finding, not an embarrassment.
4. Put numbers on every threshold, and check them against what the systems enforce.
5. Review at every reorganisation and at least annually; stale allocation is worse than none.
6. Keep it one page per team. Length is the main reason these documents go unread.

Ettex Sheets suits this better than prose: one row per activity with the decision owner, who performs it, who is consulted, the threshold and the cover arrangement. Laid out that way the gaps are visible at a glance, which is exactly what a raci matrix is for and what a paragraph-based document hides.