RAAAKERS™ Profiling and Portfolio Management
I've been reading a good deal about program and portfolio management of late. I even did the United Kingdom Office of Government Commerce's Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices course a week or two ago. This course builds on the PRINCE2 methodology for projects, but I digress. One of the problems I find with portfolio and program management is the lack of simple high level tools to measure the health of the organisation. RAAAKERS™ Profiling, which I'm developing as part of my PhD, may provide a tool.
RAAAKERS™ stands for Responsibility, Authority, Accountability, Awareness, Knowledge, Experience, Resources and Systems and is as a way of representing the main attributes associated with management of a large or complex enterprise. A bottom up approach is applied by collecting data from end users and then aggregating it into a visualisation. I've used it a few times and my colleague Doctor Mark Burnett has also used it with success - see this peer-reviewed article for a description of its use in an organisation. Anyway today I thought I would look at data collected in my PhD and see if the resultant visualisations might be of use. Consider the graph below.
The graph shows eleven programs in a portfolio. Each program has five or more projects, and data has been aggregated to the program level. In this graph we are only showing the responsibility, authority, and accountability attributes. These attributes provide an indicator of autonomy of action. In this case the green lines indicate a positive relationship and the red lines a negative relationship. The graph would be interpreted as the Units are held responsible and accountable, but feel they lack sufficient authority. Now consider the next graph.
The awareness, knowledge and experience indicators provide a feel for the knowledge state or the organisation. Most units feel they have the knowledge and experience internal to their organisation, but some, like Units K, J and I, feel awareness is a problem. A knowledge management initiative therefore might focus on the dissemination of information. Now consider the next graph.
There is almost universal dissatisfaction with resources and systems. No-one has provided a positive response, and most have provided a negative response. Organisationally this is where effort should be directed.
The next two graphs provide insight at the program level, by focussing on the Unit. Unit D are largely indifferent, but have a problem with systems. Unit H believe they are positively accountable and responsible, but have problems with authority, awareness, resources and systems.
In all cases I am working with two mode networks that are holonic and emergent. For example I can deal with the network at the project level, or as a program of projects, or as a portfolio. The first thing I discovered is the project network is too dense to make sense, although if a project is treated as an ego-network some valuable insights can be observed. On the other hand the program network does provide some insights. What do you think?
Regards Graham
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Comments
Re: RAAAKERS™ Profiling and Portfolio Management
Graham, thanks.
I am interested in how you actually define and then measure the impost of your findings of an organisation against RAAAKERS. For example, can an organisation measure the impost of lack of authority and resources and too much accountability and responsibility? Or in other words, can an organisation measure the cost of not matching accountability and responsibility with concomitant authority and resources? The reason why I am interested is to determine what an organisation requires to improve organisationally/culturally etc so an outcome can be achieved either a better service to customers, a better product, better income against expenditure, less turnover of staff etc. Is your RAAAKERS an eloquent solution looking for a problem or is it something we can use to Measure and thus Manage out here in commercial land? I look forward to your response.
Warm Regards, Michael.
Re: RAAAKERS™ Profiling and Portfolio Management
Hi Michael.
Thanks for your response and the questions. First let me assure you RAAAKERS™ has been used to good effect in a couple of government organisations, one of which is Defence. The responsibility, accountability and responsibility triad is, I think, obvious in Defence but perhaps less so in other organisations.
A day or two ago I published a book review called Visualizing Project Management . The authors' eloquently capture a common problem in the project management world, which RAAAKERS™, can diagnose. They say at page 178:
RAAAKERS™ combined with business network analysis™, and particularly the social and organisational network analysis components, can measure and visualise both real and perceived accountability, responsibility and authority. The map looks like a social capital map , or an organisational interface map . These maps would have attribute data to show the RAAAKERS™ attributes.
I firmly believe we can demonstrate where the networks need to be weaved because they are mismatched. A mismatch must cost time, money and resources.
I trust this answers, at least in part, your questions. Thanks again for your response.
Best Regards
Graham