Step 6 of 8
REFY · then refine
Enable — make ownership explicit
Most bottlenecks that look like capacity problems are ownership problems. An item does not sit because nobody has time; it sits because nobody is certain they are allowed to decide.
E costs nothing but conversations, which is why it comes before technology. That order is not a principle: every tool encodes the ownership it finds. Where ownership is unclear, the tool encodes the confusion — and makes it permanent.
- Answers the question
- Who decides, who executes, who is merely informed?
- What the step produces
- For every remaining step, exactly one accountable role, a named deputy and a decision limit.
How the step is carried out
Name a role per step, not a department
“Purchasing decides” is an address, not an accountability. The accountable party is a role that one person fills and that can, if pressed, be named.
Separate deciding from executing
Whoever decides does not have to execute. Merge the two into one person because it seems quicker in the short term and you create precisely the bottleneck O reports: one role serialising two tasks that could run in parallel.
Define the cover
Who decides when the accountable person is away for two weeks? Without an answer, every holiday is a process stoppage — and in the re-measurement it shows up as a heavy right tail on the lead time distribution.
Set limits in both directions
Up to what amount, what quantity, what risk does this role decide alone? Without a limit, anything doubtful escalates upwards, and the escalation point becomes the bottleneck of the next cycle.
Check it against the utilisation from O
If a role was already close to its capacity limit in the measurement, it must not pick up another decision here. Settling ownership sometimes means redistributing it.
Finished when
- For every step it can be stated without asking around who is accountable for it.
- No decision has two accountable parties.
- Every role has a named deputy who is actually permitted to decide.
- Every decision right has an upper and a lower limit.
- The utilisation figures from O have been revisited after the redistribution.
The typical mistake
Confusing accountability with attendance
When three people sit in an approval, two of them are usually spectators — and they still have to be asked, each adding their own response time. The effect is not additive: three people with a day’s response time each do not produce three days, they produce the wait for the slowest of three, which on average is considerably worse than one day. People can also be informed after the decision has been made.
No calculator for this step
There is no calculator for E either. What there is, is the role load from O — it shows which role has to give a decision away before anything else will help.
The step, worked through
Role load in the sample analyses is exactly the quantity at stake here: a utilisation above a hundred per cent is not a diligence problem but an accountability drawn too narrowly.
The analyses are constructed models, not client projects. Their figures show what a measurement would look like — they are not results achieved for anyone.
- Sample analysisAN-2026-08
The sales lead who shows up as two boxes
A packaging printer measures the path from incoming order to order confirmation. The bottleneck is the credit check. The second finding is a role two steps share, and it only becomes an action once the first one is dealt with.
- Sample analysisAN-2026-07
The loudest process in the building is not the most expensive
An engineering consultancy wants to digitalise leave requests. The measurement agrees with the complaint and still not with the investment. The process is slow, but cheap.
- Sample analysisAN-2026-06
The €500 approval limit nobody has touched since
A plastics processor has every purchase above €500 signed by the managing director. The limit is old, the prices are not. Four out of five orders pass through a gate that opens twice a week.
Questions
In substance yes, without the matrix. Two rules do the work: deciding and executing are separated, and each decision has exactly one accountable role. Anyone who wants to record that in a RACI table may. The table is not the outcome of this step; the clarity is.
Because every tool encodes the ownership it finds and makes it permanent. Conversely, bottlenecks that looked like capacity problems occasionally dissolve entirely once ownership is settled — in which case the lever from W is not needed at all.
Then that is the actual finding, and it should be named rather than routed around. A tool laid over contested ownership merely moves the argument into the configuration, where it gets settled more expensively because every change now costs implementation effort too.
If you want to know what your process costs: measure it.
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Remote · fixed price · result in euros