Clarifying Decision Rights with the OVIS Framework

This is so they can steer evaluation to advance their organisational imperatives to widen participation to increase social equity and social mobility and avoid implementing evaluation practices that might impede these goals (e.g. by incentivising deadweight). Simplicity and clarity in decision rights can sometimes prove to be the missing ingredient in an otherwise “stuck” transformation effort. For instance, one Fortune 500 organization in the financial services industry implemented several agile practices, including redesigning their organization into network-based teams, in an effort to become more agile as a business. However, leaders quickly found that the changed structure alone was not yielding the hoped-for benefits.

• By effectively delegating decision rights, the company eliminated the tendency to escalate decisions to numerous executives.
• These guidelines inform the organization about who makes decisions, what decisions to make, and how info rights flow, e.g., from external industry experts, internal data analysis, decision-making meetings, etc.
• Deloitte can help you improve your performance by creating an adaptable, mission-driven organization structure that aligns your workforce with your strategy and positions you to thrive today and in the future.
• These practices can produce a symbolic and legitimising effect of evaluation (Raimondo, 2018).
• They then assigned decision-making accountability to specific people or cross-functional groups, highlighting decisions for which they deemed it essential to bring cognitive diversity—diversity of thought—to foster innovation and get drugs to market more quickly.
• By adopting a detailed, well thought-out approach to decision rights, organizations can inspire a new culture of transparency and accountability that will help them become more competitive, more adaptive, and more responsive to marketplace needs.

Within People Strategy

This means, when necessary, that leaders must vigilantly reinforce the structure by sending decisions back with clear guidance on where the leader expects the decision to be made and by whom. If signs of congestion or dysfunction appear, leaders should reexamine the decision-making structure to make sure alignment, processes, and accountability are optimally arranged. Sometimes a series of decisions that might appear small in isolation represent a big bet when taken as a whole. A global technology company we know missed several opportunities that it could have seized through big-bet investments, because it was making technology-development decisions independently across each of its product https://www.bookstime.com/ lines, which reduced its ability to recognize far-reaching shifts in the industry.

• Yet with approved COVID-19 vaccines now being rolled out across the globe, the return of business as usual (and with it, a slower organizational pace) looms large.
• Members of key decision-making bodies complete such evaluations at regular intervals (after every fifth or tenth meeting).
• Broadly speaking, the implications of ignoring the valuing process within evaluation can lead to an increase in bureaucratic capture.
• The faculty-based WP Practitioner at the Russell Group University follows a similar process and often makes concrete changes to their activity based on their observations.
• Alternatively, evaluation based on a belief in social mobility tends to put the focus of change on the individual student, such as to ‘raise their aspirations’ (O’Sullivan et al., 2019; Spohrer et al., 2018; Wisker & Masika, 2017).

Designate individuals for each decision-making role

In WP, this is known as ‘deadweight’, where students likely to progress to HE without any intervention are targeted for support (Harrison, 2012). Deadweight provides the illusion that programmes are effective, which helps to feed the bureaucracy instead of holding it to account. MIT CISR helps executives meet the challenge of leading increasingly digital and data-driven organizations. We provide insights on how decision making framework organizations effectively realize value from approaches such as digital business transformation, data monetization, business ecosystems, and the digital workplace.

What are decision rights tools?

Deloitte can help you improve your performance by creating an adaptable, mission-driven organization structure that aligns your workforce with your strategy and positions you to thrive today and in the future. In the end, improving decision rights is an achievable goal that can start with the single decision to proceed. By adopting a detailed, well thought-out approach to decision rights, organizations can inspire a new culture of transparency and accountability that will help them become more competitive, more adaptive, and more responsive to marketplace needs. Sometimes, an organization may want certain bookkeeping decisions to be made by groups, not by individuals. One reason group decision-making can be desirable is that it brings multiple perspectives to the table, which can improve decision quality.

• The first iteration of the theme became “evaluation influence differs depending on the level at which it is being reported to within the organisational hierarchy”.
• Boston Consulting Group partners with leaders in business and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities.
• Teasdale et al., (2023) define values underpinning evaluators’ perception of equity and justice as ‘values related to social betterment’.
• The initiatives that we’ve done have come from a deep understanding of what we’re trying to achieve—the difference we’re trying to make in the world.
• That said, while giving frontline workers more decision-making authority can increase adaptability, it can also create confusion if accountabilities are not clearly defined and communicated.

Organization Strategy

• As we learned from our own experience, the process of identifying decision makers is iterative and generative.
• Organizations must explicitly state their decision rights to empower their teams, encourage transparency, and streamline workflows.
• To do this, the group should have a charter that articulates its mission, with the full endorsement of the organization’s senior leadership team.
• When decision rights are clearly defined, it reduces ambiguity and enables individuals to take ownership and responsibility for their choices.
• For the Administrative Assistant at the Russell Group University, the small changes to activities tend to be logistical, in line with the focus of their job role.
• Due to resource constraints and different staffing structures, evaluation processes differ slightly within the FEC.

They moved people and roles around and called them “chapters” and “guilds,” and yet nothing really changed; in fact, the new structure created further confusion and decision-making delays, as the accountabilities for decisions had not been clearly assigned. It was not until the organization focused specifically on decision-making that performance began to improve. Leaders clarified which few decisions mattered most—the ones that had a significant impact on resources and outcomes—and identified which person or group had the authority to make each decision. They then communicated these decision rights to the accountable people and groups, along with clear guidelines for when a decision would need to be escalated.

Download the Decision Rights Framework Template

This study examines how values influence WP-based evaluation practices and how evaluation influences decision-making within three diverse English HE Providers. To achieve this aim, the study follows a constructivist and pragmatic approach to knowledge generation, recognising that humans create knowledge in different and often changing contexts and that the knowledge we produce changes as we interact with the world (McWilliams, 2016). Constructivism has been linked to Deweyan pragmatism based on Dewey’s belief in language and communication in the construction of meaning, particularly meaning constructed through participation and interactions with others (Garrison, 1995). Considering the exploratory nature of the study and the constructivist approach applied, interviews were chosen as the single research method for data collection because they are most useful when the purpose of the research is to understand individual perspectives and experiences (Roulston & Choi, 2018).