Decision Rights: Who in the Shop Decides What

Why this matters

In most shops of five to twenty people, every decision that nobody owns falls back on the owner by default. The CSR asks whether she can knock something off a bill, the dispatcher asks whether he can pull a tech off a maintenance call, the lead tech asks whether he can get the van's brakes done today. Each question takes two minutes. Sixty of them a fortnight is most of a working day, spent in fragments, and the people asking learn that nothing moves until the owner answers. A decision-rights map fixes that by writing down, for each recurring decision, one person who decides, who must be asked first, and who must be told after.

The three letters, and why only three

Decision rights are the standing answer to "whose call is this?" Corporate frameworks carry five or six roles (RACI, DACI, Bain's RAPID). A twelve-person shop needs three:

• D, decides. One name per row. Not "the office" and not two people. If two people can decide, each assumes the other did, or both do and contradict each other.
• C, consulted before. Their input is required before the decision, and the D must actually ask. Consulted is not a veto. The D listens and still decides.
• T, told after. They need to know it happened, by a stated time, because it changes their work. The bookkeeper is told about a write-off; the CSR is told when a customer has been fired so she stops booking them.

Everyone else is neither asked nor told, and that is deliberate. A map where everyone is a C is a map where nothing gets decided.

Step 1: Log what actually comes to you for two weeks

Before drawing anything, keep a tally of every question that reaches you that is really a decision: on the phone, in the yard, by text. Write one line each: what was asked, who asked, whether you could have predicted it. Two weeks covers both pay-cycle and month-end decisions in most shops.

Why first: owners who draw the map from memory list the big decisions (hiring, trucks, pricing) and miss the small recurring ones, which are where the interruptions live. If skipped: the map covers decisions that come up four times a year and leaves the thirty-a-week ones on your phone.

Step 2: Group the log into decision types

Most logs collapse into ten to fifteen recurring types. "Can I give Mrs. Alvarez ten percent off" and "the Parkers want a discount for the second unit" are one type: a discount within a limit. Name each type as a verb and an object with its limit attached, because the limit is often what moves a row from one person to another.

If skipped: you end up assigning individual cases, and the next case that is slightly different comes back to you.

Step 3: Give each row one D, starting with the lowest competent level

For each type, ask who is closest to the information and competent to decide, then put the D there unless the decision is expensive to undo. Whether a decision can be reversed cheaply is its own subject; see related: Reversible and Irreversible Decisions in a Small Shop. The working rule here: reversible and frequent goes down to the person who sees it first; irreversible and rare stays up.

Why the lowest level: the person on the call has facts you would have to ask them for anyway. If skipped: you keep rows you do not need, and the map becomes a list of your own job.

Step 4: Name the C, with a time limit on the consult

A consult without a clock becomes a stall. Write the limit into the row: "consult lead tech, he answers within 2 hours or the D proceeds." For same-day schedule decisions, use 15 minutes. If the C misses the window, the D decides and tells them. This is the single provision that stops a consult turning into a hidden veto.

Step 5: Name the T, and when they hear

Write who is told and by when: same day, at the weekly meeting, at month end. The T column is the one owners skip, and it is the one that causes the blow-ups. A dispatcher who reshuffles three jobs without telling the CSR leaves her confirming appointments that no longer exist.

Step 6: Set the limits as numbers

Every row that involves money, time or risk needs a number on it, or the boundary gets argued every time. Express limits in units that do not go stale: a percentage of the ticket, hours of labor, days of downtime. "Discount up to 10 percent of the invoice" works. "Small discounts" does not.

If skipped: the CSR either never uses the authority (because she cannot tell whether a case is small) or uses it on everything.

The map for a twelve-person shop

The shop: owner, office manager (OM), dispatcher (DISP), CSR, part-time bookkeeper (BOOK), lead tech (LEAD), and six techs. Twelve people. This is the version they pinned above the dispatch desk after the two-week log.

DECISION                   D      C          T
-------------------------  -----  ---------  ----------
Same-day reschedule        DISP   LEAD 15m   CSR now
Discount to 10 pct         CSR    -          OM weekly
Discount over 10 pct       OM     OWNER 2h   BOOK
Workmanship callback       OM     LEAD       OWNER wkly
Tech overtime, same day    DISP   OM         BOOK
Truck down, rent or wait   LEAD   OM 2h      DISP now
Stock reorder, usual list  LEAD   -          BOOK
New supplier               OM     LEAD       BOOK
Fire a customer            OM     OWNER      CSR now
Write off a balance        OWNER  BOOK       OM
Hire or let go a tech      OWNER  OM, LEAD   ALL
Change a price book line   OWNER  OM, LEAD   CSR, techs

Read it row by row. The CSR is a D for small discounts and is told about nothing, because nothing she decides there changes anyone's day. The dispatcher owns same-day moves but must give the lead tech 15 minutes to object, because the lead knows which tech can handle which job. The owner is the D on three rows (write-offs, hiring and letting go, price changes) and a required C on two more (discounts over 10 percent and firing a customer). Note what is not on it: anything that came up once in the log. Rare decisions do not need a row; they need a conversation.

Worked example: the log, the map, and thirty days later

Over ten working days the owner logged 64 questions that were decisions. They grouped into twelve types, the twelve rows above.

Sorting the 64. 41 of them fell into rows the map assigns a D other than the owner: 18 same-day reschedules, 11 small discounts, 7 stock reorders, 5 overtime approvals. The other 23 landed in rows where the owner is still the D or a required C (64 minus 41 leaves 23).

The consults. Of those 23, most were the owner being consulted on discounts over 10 percent and on firing customers. Those do not need to interrupt anyone; the OM now brings them to a standing 15-minute slot at 3:30 each afternoon, unless the 2-hour clock on the row says the answer is needed sooner.

Thirty days later the owner logged ten working days again: 19 interruptions, down from 64, a drop of 45, about 70 percent of the original count. The 19 split two ways:

• 11 were legitimate: urgent items in rows the owner owns, mostly a write-off a customer was disputing on the phone and two hiring questions.
• 8 were leaks: someone asking about a row they already own. Five of the eight were the dispatcher asking about overtime, which his row says he decides.

Reading the leaks. Eight leaks from one map is not failure; it is the map being tested. The five overtime leaks all came from the same week, and the owner asked why. The answer: the dispatcher had approved overtime once in week one, the owner had grumbled about the payroll total in front of the crew, and the dispatcher concluded the authority was not real. One public second-guess undid the row. The owner said, in the next morning meeting, that the overtime call was the dispatcher's and that he would raise any concern with him privately. The overtime leaks stopped.

What breaks a decision-rights map

Overruling the D in public. The example above is the common case. Every time you reverse a delegated decision in front of others, every D on the map recalculates whether their authority exists. If a decision was wrong, raise it privately, and if the pattern repeats, change the row rather than overriding the person.

Two names in the D column. "OM or owner" means neither. If you genuinely want both able to decide, split the row by a limit so each has a clean range.

Rows without limits. A row that says "discounts: CSR" with no percentage lets one generous week turn into a margin problem, after which the owner takes the row back and the CSR stops trusting the map.

No T for the bookkeeper. Money decisions made by a D other than the owner still have to reach the books. Most map failures that show up as a "surprise" at month end are a missing T.

Delegating the decision without the reasoning. A D who does not know why the limit is 10 percent will make good calls inside it and bad ones at its edge. Writing the reasoning into a decision rule is its own task; see related: Writing Decision Rules So the Office Stops Asking You.

What changes the answer

A partnership. Where two owners share the business, the top rows need their own agreement, with a tie-breaker, before this map can sit underneath it. See related: Partnership Roles and Decision Rights From Day One.

Fewer than about five people. In a three-person shop the map is usually two rows long: what the office decides without calling you, and what it never decides. Draw those two and stop.

A new person in a seat. A D row belongs to a role, but a new hire in that role should start with lower limits for the first 60 days, written on the map with the date they lift. Giving a two-week-old CSR the same discount authority as a five-year one is how the row gets taken back.

How to know it is working

Re-run the two-week log at 30 days and again at 90. The count should fall and stay down, and the leaks should shift from "asking about my own row" to genuinely new decision types, which become candidate rows. If the count drops and then climbs back, look for a recent public override or a limit nobody believes. And ask each D, privately, which of their rows they still feel they need to check with you on. That answer tells you which rows exist on paper only.

References

• Bain and Company, RAPID decision-role framework (the source of the "decide, consult, inform" separation used here, simplified to three roles)
• See related: Delegating the Decision, Not Just the Task
• See related: Reversible and Irreversible Decisions in a Small Shop
• See related: Writing Decision Rules So the Office Stops Asking You
• See related: Partnership Roles and Decision Rights From Day One