Establishing Clear Roles and Responsibilities in the Utility Sector – A Point of Difference

Establishing Clear Roles and Responsibilities in the Utility Sector

Utilities and infrastructure operators have teams and departments that must coordinate and collaborate to achieve the company’s mission and objectives efficiently. Achieving that goal is essential to reaching operational excellence.

A challenge in achieving operational excellence in utilities is that there isn’t a silver bullet, model, tool, or practice to deliver it. Like personal health and welfare, operational excellence in organizations requires many elements that, in combination, create the conditions for success. The range of factors contributing to operational excellence in utilities includes effective leadership, a viable business strategy, business processes, technology, employee engagement, communication, and the ability to execute all functional tasks required to complete the company’s work. That said, having people in the right roles, with the capability and role clarity to perform them, is foundational.

At the Engine Room, we frequently support utilities and infrastructure operators that have invested heavily in recruiting capable, qualified, and well-intentioned people, only to find that individuals hold different beliefs about what their roles truly entail. In many cases, varying strengths and weaknesses further shape how work is approached and executed, leading to inconsistent outcomes.

Achieving operational excellence in these conditions is similar to building a winning Olympic relay team. Each individual must execute their role at a high level, while seamless coordination is required during critical handoffs. Operational excellence depends not only on strong individual performance, but also on effective interactions between roles and teams. In our view, both dimensions must be developed in parallel. To address this, the Engine Room has developed an improvement approach that works simultaneously across two dimensions: horizontally, to clarify functional roles within a business process, and vertically, to define leadership roles, accountabilities, and decision rights.

Horizontal Role Clarification

Horizontal role clarification leverages tools such as process mapping and models such as RACI to produce documented descriptions of how business processes work and the responsibilities of different participants within them. It is the more common form of role clarification. In utility organizations, horizontal role clarification is a powerful enabler of operational excellence across forecasting, planning and scheduling, budgeting, regulatory relations, and other end-to-end business processes that span multiple teams. These processes typically require coordinated inputs, disciplined analysis, and clear decision-making before action can be taken.

In applying horizontal role-clarification tools, The Engine Room has found that while the RACI model is widely recognized, the RAPID model more effectively addresses its known limitations most notably the frequent confusion between “responsible” and “accountable.” As a result, we use the RAPID framework to clearly define roles and contributions across a business process as follows:

To clarify roles and responsibilities across complex business processes such as planning and scheduling fieldwork in an electric utility, the RAPID model is a highly effective tool. It enables the development of clear process descriptions that help participants, including planners and schedulers, understand their roles, while also providing broader organizational visibility into how the process functions end to end.

What horizontal role clarification does not address, however, is the vertical leadership structure surrounding the process. Planners and schedulers report to managers, who in turn report to more senior leaders. While these leaders may not be directly involved in day-to-day tactical activities, they retain critical supervisory, leadership, and governance responsibilities.

Vertical Role Clarification

These misalignments often manifest as micromanagement by managers, directors engaging directly with front-line employees in ways that undermine supervisors, executives becoming overly involved in operational details, or leaders attempting to direct work outside their functional authority.

Vertical role clarification is particularly challenging because leadership cannot be fully defined through role descriptions alone. Leadership expectations are inherently more nuanced than what can be captured in formal documentation. Effective leadership requires the confidence and judgment to distinguish between strategic and tactical decision-making and an understanding that strong leadership is situational and context dependent.

At The Engine Room, vertical role alignment begins with a clear understanding of the foundational purpose of each level in the organizational hierarchy. For example, a supervisor’s role is to sustain strategic direction, processes, and pe