hi
guys how can the responsibilities be strictly defiend in a small company where every one does everything. can we divide it into departments and then add multiple people in multiple departments so that it shall be easy to generalize by saying personnel of that dept shall do certain things and so on.

thanks

Keep it simple do not over think it. (I feel like Yoda). I would suggest that you sit down with the upper management (probably the owner and his or her son(s) or daughter(s)) and think about what the primary tasks, aka Processes in the company are (do not create artificial departments). Some possible examples are sales, manufacturing, maintainace, calibration, shipping and recieving, etc... After doing this ask the president/owner to assign ownership to the different areas. If some one in manufacturing has a question who do they go to. If there is a problem with a product or service who gets to be in charge of fixing it for the various areas. Then list the others acording to job title(journeyman, apprentice, machinist, general labor, shop help, whatever is applicable) then write job discriptions if not already done. I think that is it. Did I forget anything?
I found lots of good job descriptions online and just tailored them to the companies need.

Hope this helps,
Mark

you can list the "main" person responsible (in a perfect world, who you would have doing the task) and then add "or designee". You just have to make sure that if Alpha isn't doing the job, he has let Beta know to pick up the slack. Communication is all important in this scheme, but it works very well as long as you have the training/competency evals recorded. I've used it in the past and never had a problem with the registrar.

you can list the "main" person responsible (in a perfect world, who you would have doing the task) and then add "or designee". Yes, I agree. That one person is branded as responsible for something does not necessarily mean that he has to do it himself. Several people can share the chore, but it's his responsibility that it gets done.

/Claes

Yes, I agree. That one person is branded as responsible for something does not necessarily mean that he has to do it himself. Several people can share the chore, but it's his responsibility that it gets done.

/Claes

I'll add my concurrance to this.
Most of our level two procedures have statement such as:

"Production manager carries primary responsibility for the application of this procedure."


James

I agree that it is important to name the positions versus the people so the documents don't need revising every time someone moves in or out of a position.

I once saw a quality manual that used names in its organizational charts for defining responsibility. The typist's right hand must have been shifted slightly to the right because one person's last name, which was Flanigan, was typed "F;amogam." We seek to avoid that sort of thing where possible...

I recently helped a 50 person company with this very issue. No one had job titles, and there were no job descriptions to help us determine 'competencies'. We used broad titles like "painting dept associate"; "painting department supervision", and wrote job descriptions with very broad statements of responsibility.

To add one more 'helpful' note to your query I would suggest you make a list of all preferred departments in your organization, whether you have someone specifically manning that department or not. Then do the same with the job classifications you would 'like' to have in each of those departments. Now define those classifications, but keep it simple and define only the required cometencies in regards to "Education, Training, Skills and Experience." Uh uh uh - no and/or statements here please.

Once you get those done then you assign them to the employees you have available. In other words you have just provided descriptions for all the 'hats' anyone will ever have to wear - now, dish out the hats.

Gary MacLean

With a small company you have to define the basic functions such as sell, buy, produce, design, deliver, support, etc. You can fluff up the names of the functions such as marketing & sales; manufacturing; design and development; order and delivery; customer support and quality. As said earlier. Define the functions and assign people as primary focus.

To echo what other posts have said. You work by job not person. So you defime the responsibilities of the hat. Then you give hats to people. A key thing here is, although people do many jobs their skill level won't be the same eg when people are covering for others or helping them out. So its a good idea to have skill(job) grades. So you go...can approve othes, can train others, fully competent, competent to work with fully competent, trainee... you got the gist. You can even do your organization chart by function, which has the spin off of making your company seem bigger. I'm with a CB and we work like this. I can train but not approve auditors. I am lead auditor (can work alone) and started of as provisional where I was under supervision of a trainer.