Implementing AoRs - Introduction: Why Should You Implement AoRs?
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When everyone owns a process or task, no one really does. And with no one officially in charge, don’t expect to get good results.
AoRs are a simple, yet powerful tool that addresses this exact problem. They make sure everything important is owned by one person in your team. They clarify who owns what, how things get done, and bring transparency across all teams.
Implementing AoRs starts with listing what each person in your organization is responsible for and reworking that list until you have covered all core aspects of your company and have one person owning each item. The AoR list then becomes a tool helping you visualize and manage ownership across teams and individuals.
In this series of blog articles dedicated to AoRs we will zoom in on this management concept and give you actionable advice to help you successfully implement these with your team.
In this first article we want to introduce you to the concept of AoRs and convince you - if you haven’t yet - to implement AoRs in your organization.
Let’s go!
AoRs stands for “Areas of Responsibility”. AoRs allow you to capture and distribute responsibilities within your organization.
They work as follows: each AoR has a unique owner. The owner of the AoR is responsible - among other things - for the following:
Additionally, one or multiple contributors can support the owner on the execution part. This means the owner does not need to do all the work; if they need extra help, they should get it from contributors, whose work they then have to coordinate.
Here is a first example of an AoR from the Sales department:
Dwight is owning this AoR and is deputy Jim will take over if needed. The responsibility at hand is producing and sharing the Sales performance metrics every week. Everything around this AoR is managed by them:
There is a reason why implementing AoRs has become common practice in fast growing tech companies: they come with many benefits.
AoRs set a standard on how to operate across all teams and hold everyone accountable. These benefits compound as your organization and the complexity of your daily operations grow.
In the next articles we will outline how you can start implementing AoRs and distributing ownership across your organization. Stay tuned!