What are you accountable for? And what kind of authority do you have to properly acquit that accountability? Whom do you report to? How do you get inducted into the role? Who decides which tasks are to be done, of what type and by when?
Everyone craves clarity in their role. We want to know who makes decisions about hiring and firing from the team and who will do the appraisals. Who has the authority to negotiate pay, whether up or down? The classic job description often covers many aspects of your role. But what happens when you get assigned to a project outside of your functional home?
[Listen to audio version, read by David Hodes]
What is the relationship between you and a person in a horizontal business function who has a different boss to you? Who has authority when you need to get a task done for which you are held accountable, but for which you don’t have direct authority over the person you need to do the work? Job descriptions get hazy when it comes to the nature of the horizontal relationships between the silos. A prerequisite of effective collaboration is having a consistent means by which work is assigned from one part of the management accountability hierarchy to another without having to go to that place in the hierarchy to seek permission from the manager who spans both silos.
Elliott Jaques, a pioneer in organisational design, came up with the idea of TARRs and TIRRs, which stand for Task Assigning Role Relationships and Task Initiating Role Relationships.
Let’s say Alice is Bob’s boss. Not only is she authorised to get Bob to do something but is also held accountable by her own manager for Bob’s output (and its quantity, quality and delivery time, within resources and procedures). These are the classic vertical relationships defined by the org chart.
Now imagine Alice is not Bob’s boss, but wants to initiate a task for which Bob is qualified. Usually it is Bob’s manager (not Alice) who is held accountable for whether or not Bob does the task, and is further held accountable for Bob’s output. TIRRs define who can ask what of whom when it’s outside of the vertical silo.
In this article, I’ll focus on the different types of horizontal relationships and how they contribute to running the business more effectively.
We’ve all come across ‘dotted line’ relationships where someone informally reports to a manager from another silo. But while Alice may be Bob’s senior (say she is a manager and Bob is a superintendent), in horizontal relationships she is often his peer and sometimes even his junior. By way of example, it’s clear that a military policeman of lowly rank can prevent a General from gaining access to a part of a military base, or a safety officer can instruct the CEO to don her personal protective equipment before entering a site. In most organisations, though, roles and responsibilities can quickly get tangled.
Fortunately, Jaques came up with seven different types of relationship that bring clarity: Advisory, Auditing, Collateral, Coordinative, Monitoring, Prescribing, and Service.
Let’s say Alice belongs to the Engineering function and is running a large project to implement a new asset management system. As such, she’ll need access to people from Production, Maintenance, Finance, IT, HR and the like. Alice’s position description contains nothing about her authority over the many people with whom she has to interact. The project affects the whole business and has been identified by the executive as critical to its future success.
“What happens when you get assigned to
a project outside of your functional home?”
As you read through these horizontal role relationships bear in mind that, once set in place, you no longer need to seek permission for every interaction you have from the manager of the person you wish to interact with. Moreover, that manager’s subordinate is obliged to cooperate to the extent required by the type of role relationship put in place. This can have a positive impact on productivity, as work can flow according to the structure and procedures made explicit by the role relationships. There is no need to wait and stop and start your task whilst waiting for permission to keep your work flowing.
Advisory: Alice is accountable for deciding on opportunities to help Bob by advising him and trying to persuade him to take that advice. Bob is accountable for deciding whether or not to take the advice. If he decides not to, then Alice is not authorised to go further. Bob has production targets to reach and has his own plan of how to go about reaching those targets in a safe, reliable and cost-effective way. He cannot merely dismiss the advice offered by Alice but is free to reject it once it has been properly considered.
Auditing: Alice is accountable for inspecting Bob’s work and deciding whether it is satisfactorily within limits. If Alice decides it isn’t, she has the authority to instruct Bob to stop that particular activity, and Bob must do so. For example, the new asset management system has improved standards for safety and the way maintenance engineers go about their tasks. If Bob has failed to take these new standards into account, Alice instructs him to stop until the new standards can be incorporated into his work.
Collateral: Alice and Bob are accountable for making mutual adjustments in their work in line with their manager’s context so that the best overall outcome for the business is achieved. The managers for Engineering and Maintenance have agreed on the asset management plans and have asked Alice and Bob to work out the ideal asset strategies to ensure they achieve the desired outcome contained in the plan. Alice might privilege reliability over cost whereas Bob might have a tight budget to work to, which doesn’t allow for all of what Alice would like to incorporate. The two of them work out a solution within the context set by their respective managers.
Coordinative: Alice not only has monitoring authority with respect to Bob and Bob’s peers, but also has the authority to bring them all together and try to persuade them to take a common course of action. Alice knows that to get the best bang for buck with the new asset management system she will have to get input from maintenance, operations, HR and IT. She decides that the best way to do this is to hold a series of workshops at which Bob and his peers will have to be present. She coordinates the meetings without further reference to Bob’s manager and all must do everything reasonable and possible to attend and contribute.
Monitoring: Alice is accountable for keeping abreast of what Bob is doing and for taking opportunities to persuade Bob to take alternative courses of action which Alice thinks are more in line with policy. If Bob does not accept Alice’s persuasion and she considers the matter to be serious, she must report to a higher authority. Alice has a schedule to complete the first phase of the project and is being held to account for its delivery. Failure to meet the schedule milestones would have serious implications for other aspects of the integration of her project with other projects currently running in the business. Bob feels under the pump with work assigned to him by his boss and has a natural tendency to do what he thinks will please his boss rather than what Alice is recommending. If Alice and Bob cannot agree, Alice is obliged to escalate, without any fear that she is dobbing in Bob.
Prescribing: If Alice judges that Bob is doing something that may have seriously destructive consequences, Alice has the authority to instruct Bob to carry out corrective activities, and he is accountable for doing so at the time prescribed. Alice does not have managerial accountability or authority with respect to Bob. She determines that Bob’s attitude to her project is having serious consequence across the whole of Bob’s function. He doesn’t like the asset management project, feeling that it’s interfering in his obligation to keep the plant running. He has told anyone who cares to listen that he will only do what Alice is calling for when it suits him.
Both the engineering and maintenance managers are resolute in their desire to get the new asset management system in place as soon as possible, knowing that the VP Operations, their mutual boss, has made clear it is a critical means for delivering his mandate of safety, volume and cost. To move matters along, Alice is equipped with a prescribing role relationship with respect to Bob who is then compelled to do what Alice calls for. Although Alice now has project authority over Bob, she does not have managerial authority or accountability—that role resides with the maintenance manager.
Service (getting and giving): The service-getter, Alice, has the authority to go to the service-giver, Bob, and to instruct him to provide an authorised service. Bob is accountable for providing the service unless he lacks the resources to do so, in which case he must indicate to Alice whether and when it will be possible to provide the authorised service. Alice goes to IT and asks them to stand up the new asset management software application and configure it in a way that is fit for purpose for the project’s User Acceptance Testing phase. There is a service-level agreement between Engineering and IT, which allows for the required service to be accomplished within seven days of an authorised request. IT receives the authorised request and apologises to Alice that due to an extraordinary workload and the absence of some critical staff members, they’ll only be able to stand up the application in three weeks.
Alice goes ballistic, releasing a tirade of unmentionable invective, and fires the IT manager on the spot. Fortunately for the IT manager, Alice is not his boss, and he has years of experience in dealing with colleagues who can’t believe it takes IT a week merely to turn on the switch of a new machine. ‘Just kidding,’ he replies when Alice finally calms down, ‘I can get it done in a day. We just implemented the TOC-based Dev Ops, and the difference it has made is awesome.’
The different types of horizontal relationships are summarised in the table below:

It may sound like a lot of bother to define these horizontal relationships, but it’s worth investing the time in advance. The clarity you gain not only minimises headaches from personality clashes and unvoiced assumptions but prevents buck-passing and arse-covering. Do it for one key project, learn some lessons and adapt it to create the future standard. Best of all, removing the frustration and procrastination of the old ways of doing things leads to huge increases in engagement and productivity.
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What’s next?
The change from standard thinking to Theory of Constraints (TOC) is both profound and exhilarating. To make it both fun and memorable, we use a business simulation we call The Right Stuff Workshop.
We’d love to run it with you. To learn more:

[Background photo by Alain Pham on Unsplash]
“A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole
right away. He must have time to modify his shape”
—Mark Twain
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A patient may ask for a smaller device, a clearer display or an easier app. Those requests matter, but they leave a deeper question unanswered: what is the person trying to accomplish, and why does the current approach make it difficult?
Someone using a monitoring device may want to understand whether their condition is changing, decide when to seek help or manage daily activities with greater confidence. The device is one means of achieving that outcome.
A powerful question asks how well your organization understands the jobs patients are trying to get done. A strong answer connects patient research with clearly defined outcome statements that become the formal user needs your teams use to build the design history file. Outcome-based user needs are easier to validate, flow more easily into design requirements, and result in faster time to market.
“A feature request describes a possible answer. Understanding the patient’s job to be done sets your design team up to deliver a better solution faster.”
A useful job statement describes an activity the patient needs to accomplish in a relevant context. It should remain understandable without naming your product or preferred technology.
“Use our app every day” describes behavior your organization wants. “Provide a way to recognize when a change in my condition requires professional advice” describes the outcome a patient actually desires.
The distinction affects research. If the team starts with the app, it will ask how to improve screens and interactions. Starting with the job opens questions about information, confidence, timing and support. The best solution may involve changes beyond the app.
Define a scope the team can investigate. “Live a healthier life” expresses an aspiration but is too broad to guide detailed engineering decisions on its own. “Minimize the time it takes to find a solution to my health concern without needing to talk to a doctor or call someone” gives a team a direction, a measure, an object of control and contextual clarifier(s).
Journey mapping shows how people move through a particular care pathway. Job mapping examines what they must accomplish to achieve their purpose, including the work surrounding the interaction with your solution.
The two perspectives complement each other. A journey may show that a patient waits for follow-up. The job perspective asks what they are trying to understand or decide while waiting.
This matters because current processes can become embedded in the team’s assumptions. Patients may need a reliable way to recognize an important change; they do not necessarily need the exact sequence of activities currently provided.
Use the journey to understand context and dependencies. Use the job to examine whether a different approach could help the patient achieve the desired outcome more effectively.
Patient research begins with observation and empathy interviews at the Gemba, the place where the activity actually occurs.
For patients, that place includes the home and the settings in which they manage health alongside ordinary responsibilities. Ask people to demonstrate routines, explain decisions and describe recent experiences.
Observe what they do. Immerse yourself in the circumstances surrounding the activity. Engage through questions that let them explain their purpose in their own language.
A person may say that managing treatment is straightforward while observation reveals multiple reminders, improvised storage or reliance on a partner. Those arrangements can reveal effort and uncertainty that have become familiar enough to go unreported.
The aim is to understand the why your solution will win before making any decisions about what your solution will do. Customers will want your solution because of the outcomes it gives them, not because of what you made.
Patients with the same diagnosis may struggle with different parts of an activity. Differences in confidence, experience, resources and support can change how they define success.
Recruit participants whose circumstances reflect the population you intend to serve. Include relevant variations in health literacy, technology familiarity, physical ability and access to care. Are you targeting the tech savvy millennial, a busy parent trying to run a family with four kids or a retiree living in a managed healthcare facility?
Research should also examine emotional and social needs. A patient may want reassurance about managing a task alone or worry about drawing attention to a condition. Keep these needs visible alongside functional outcomes without assuming one design choice resolves them all.
The job mapping framework divides a job into eight recurring steps. These steps prompt investigation beyond the most visible interaction.
Apply these prompts to actual patient work. Some steps may recur or overlap. The map should help the team discover needs, rather than force experience into an artificial sequence.
“The most useful innovation may help a patient prepare, recognize an exception or recover confidence before it changes the device itself.”
Interviews generate verbatims: patients’ own descriptions of experiences, difficulties and expectations. Preserve that evidence, then interpret what each statement reveals about the job.
An illustrative verbatim might be, “I keep checking because I don’t know whether the reading matters.” The desired outcome may concern recognizing a meaningful change or understanding what action is appropriate.
A structured outcome statement identifies the direction of improvement, a measure, the object being controlled and relevant context. For example: “Minimize the time required to determine whether a change in a reading requires contacting my care team.”
Ask the team if there are uncovered outcomes that can set your solution apart related to how it is purchased, installed, received, set up, learned with training support, transported, maintained, upgraded, replaced or disposed.
This formulation gives research and design a clearer target. It does not establish a clinical threshold or promise that a device can safely make the decision independently, but often the features that will make your solution “easy to use” or set you apart will come from these outcome statements.
Several comments may describe the same need. One comment may contain multiple needs. Review the evidence carefully before combining it into a set of outcomes.
Remove duplication, separate distinct outcomes and retain links to the original accounts. Use plain language that patients can understand. Avoid embedding a particular feature in the statement.
Check the interpretation with participants or other appropriate reviewers. “I want fewer notifications” might mean reducing irrelevant interruptions while preserving important information. Treating it as a demand to suppress all alerts would misrepresent the need.
The output should be a coherent set of outcomes organized by job step. Completeness and clarity matter but typically it is ideal to have at least 100 and no more than 200 outcome statements for the team.
Qualitative research discovers needs and explains them. Quantitative research helps determine how widely they matter and how well existing approaches satisfy them.
Ask patients to rate the importance of each outcome and their satisfaction with their current ability to achieve it. Make the reference situation clear so respondents evaluate comparable experiences.
A high scoring importance outcome with low satisfaction deserves investigation. High satisfaction may indicate that the need is already well served so the team can use what already exists and put more time in creating innovative solutions to high importance low satisfaction outcomes. Low importance can reduce its priority, although clinical safety requirements cannot be dismissed through a popularity score.
Use a research design appropriate to the intended population. The outcome statements are easy to rate on a five point Likert scale. Choose population quantitative research in alignment with your target persona groups.
The Outcome Driven Innovation approach uses importance and satisfaction to identify underserved outcomes. Its opportunity calculation adds importance to the positive gap between importance and satisfaction.
Use compatible scales and a clearly defined calculation. Interpret the result alongside the underlying responses, research quality and the clinical context.
Examine differences between groups. An outcome that appears adequately served overall may remain difficult for patients with less support or a different level of experience.
These differences can reveal meaningful segments based on unmet needs. They help the organization avoid treating demographic similarity as evidence that patients need the same solution. Prioritization should retain enough detail to explain whose outcome the proposed improvement will change.
A target product profile brings the priority outcomes together with business goals, available technology and other relevant requirements. It helps the team agree what success should look like before committing to a concept.
Translate patient outcomes into design inputs and measurable requirements while preserving traceability to the evidence. Define which questions remain uncertain and what research or testing will resolve them.
Evaluate concepts against the outcomes they are intended to improve. Ask whether the proposed approach reduces effort, uncertainty or difficulty for the relevant patients and results in higher satisfaction scores than the baseline solution. A favorable reaction to an attractive prototype provides limited evidence unless the team can connect it with better execution of the job.
A priority patient need may involve work performed by a clinician, caregiver or service provider. Investigate those dependencies before deciding that a product change will solve the problem.
The Theory of Constraints helps identify where improvement can change the performance of the wider pathway. A better patient interaction can have limited effect if access to essential support remains constrained.
A Value Management Office can coordinate the initiatives needed to address these connected issues and keep investment aligned with patient outcomes.
“Patient insight becomes useful design evidence when the team can show which outcome matters, who struggles with it and how the solution improves it.”
Use patient jobs to be done to review one priority patient job. Can your team state it clearly, map its steps and demonstrate which outcomes are highly important and poorly satisfied?
Start with observation and patient conversations. Build and validate the outcome statements, measure priorities and test concepts against them. That discipline gives Patient Centered Design a practical foundation for better products and more lives changed for good.

A healthcare professional can recognize the value of a medical device and still struggle to incorporate it into care. The referral may be incomplete. Diagnostic evidence may arrive late. Preparation may require extra staff. Follow-up may introduce work that nobody has agreed to own. Managing the patients before and after may require additional staff which adds risk to the business side of the practice.
Those difficulties affect the clinician’s ability to help patients reach and benefit from your solution. They deserve attention during development and throughout deployment.
The purpose is to understand how professionals encounter, assess, recommend and use a solution, and what constraints they encounter in using your solution.
A useful map connects the professional’s experience with patient flow. It helps the organization identify where support, coordination or design changes can improve the delivery of care.
“Clinical enthusiasm cannot create the time, information or supporting capacity needed to deliver a therapy.”
Healthcare professionals perform different jobs at different stages. A referring practitioner, diagnostic specialist, interventional physician, nurse and educator may all influence whether the same patient receives successful care.
Define which groups participate in your pathway and what each contributes. Who recognizes the need? Who establishes eligibility? Who performs the procedure? Who trains the patient? Who monitors outcomes and manages exceptions? Who manages insurance?
Include people whose work makes these actions possible. Coordinators, technicians and administrative staff may arrange appointments, prepare equipment or assemble records. Their contribution can govern whether clinical time is used effectively.
The map should make dependencies visible across roles. It should also clarify which actions fall within your organization’s influence and which require collaboration with care providers or other affected parties.
A professional title tells you part of the story. Experience, setting, case volume, access to support, business acumen and familiarity with the therapy can change the work considerably.
An experienced specialist in a well-supported center may encounter different difficulties from a clinician who sees the condition infrequently or works in a rural area. A nurse coordinating a dedicated service may have options unavailable to someone balancing that responsibility with other duties.
Develop personas around these differences. Examine confidence in interpreting evidence, decision authority, available time, training needs and exposure to clinical or organizational risk.
Use research to test the distinctions. Personas should explain variations in behavior and requirements. They should help the team understand why an approach that works in one setting may fail to support another.
The professional’s journey may begin with awareness of an unmet clinical need or information about a potential solution. It continues through evaluating evidence, discussing alternatives and deciding whether the therapy belongs in their practice.
Adoption can involve local approvals, purchasing, training, changes to referral patterns and coordination with other teams. Clinical use then includes preparation, treatment, documentation, handover and follow-up.
Map these activities without assuming a single linear sequence. Professionals may return to evidence review after a difficult case or revise their approach when colleagues raise concerns.
Distinguish the journey of adopting the therapy from the recurring journey of delivering it to each patient. Both matter, but the barriers and improvement measures can differ.
At each stage, ask what the professional is trying to accomplish and what must be available before the work can proceed.
A decision may depend on diagnostic results, a complete patient history, clear eligibility criteria or advice from another specialty. A procedure may depend on staff, equipment and an appropriate location. Follow-up may depend on information that must be captured earlier.
Show the handovers between roles, including who supplies information and who receives it. Record where uncertainty is resolved and where work is repeated.
This reveals how a product can add burden beyond its immediate interaction. A useful output may still consume scarce clinical time if the professional must retrieve, interpret, reformat and document it through separate systems.
The time required for a clinical activity can differ greatly from the time a patient waits to receive it. Both belong on the map.
Measure preparation, clinical work, documentation and recovery from problems where relevant. Record queues, appointment delays and time lost waiting for missing information.
Distinguish professional effort from elapsed time. Some delays consume little active attention but prevent patients progressing. Others require repeated chasing, rescheduling or explanation, drawing capacity away from care.
Define a common unit of work so comparisons remain meaningful. Cases with different complexity may require different analysis. Averages alone can hide the patients or professionals who face the greatest difficulty.
The purpose is to understand usable capacity and patient progress in the actual working environment.
A pathway may depend on a small amount of specialist attention surrounded by many competing demands. Headcount alone will not show how much of that attention is available.
Examine what professionals spend their time on, including avoidable administration, repeated assessments and interruptions. Determine whether the relevant constraint is clinical expertise, supporting staff, diagnostic access, equipment or a policy governing work.
The Theory of Constraints helps focus improvement on the factor limiting the whole pathway. Increasing referrals to a service already unable to process them can lengthen waiting without increasing treatment.
Investigate the apparent bottleneck before choosing a response. Better preparation or coordination may release capacity. In other cases, additional resources or changes to the operating model will be necessary.
“The measure of a design improvement is its effect on clinical work and patient progress, including the work it creates elsewhere.”
The Gemba is where the work actually happens. Direct observation helps teams understand how professionals use information, equipment and judgment under real conditions.
Observe preparation, interruptions, handovers and the work following the visible procedure. Ask what the professional expected to receive and what they had to obtain independently. Capture workarounds and job “cheat sheets” that are homemade to make working with your solution easier.
Workarounds deserve particular attention. A clinician may keep a private checklist because the formal process omits an important step. A coordinator may repeatedly contact another service because information arrives inconsistently.
These practices reveal requirements that interviews alone may miss. Discuss observations with the people involved so the team does not mistake an isolated event for a routine pattern. Include different settings and experience levels in the research.
Gather organizational knowledge and assess technology and business perspectives before moving toward a solution. Apply that discipline to the professional journey.
Use existing clinical insight, training questions, support records and prior implementation experience to draft the map. Identify assumptions and gaps.
Assess the technologies already supporting the work. Consider compatibility with the environment, availability, maintenance, reliability and the practical resources needed for use.
Clarify the business conditions surrounding adoption. Purchasing arrangements, competing initiatives, staffing decisions and local policies may determine whether a clinically attractive solution can be implemented.
This baseline makes research more focused. It also prevents the development team from proposing changes that depend on unavailable capability or unacknowledged commitments from others.
Voice of Business research asks leaders about desired outcomes, frustrations, risks and obstacles. It also identifies decision makers and influencers who should participate early.
For a healthcare professional pathway, this means understanding who can authorize changes to responsibilities, processes, resources and technology.
Ask which other initiatives could affect implementation. Identify the independent reviewers who can challenge the team’s assumptions. Agree what success will look like from the perspective of clinical work and patient outcomes.
Make the findings visible to the team members and relevant leaders. A professional may welcome a new approach while lacking the authority to secure the resources it requires. The project needs a realistic route from individual support to organizational adoption.
Apply the five-step FOCUS process to the evidence gathered through mapping.
Find the constraint. Identify the activity or resource currently governing the flow of suitable patients through care.
Optimize for it. Protect scarce capacity from incomplete information, unnecessary preparation, avoidable interruptions and repeat work.
Collaborate around it. Coordinate upstream and downstream roles so patients, information and resources arrive when needed.
Uplift it. Add capability or change responsibilities, processes and technology when existing capacity cannot meet the need.
Start Again. Review the pathway after improvement and identify its new limiting factor.
Automation can help when the task is understood and the proposed change supports clinical work. Evaluate its consequences, including review effort, exception handling and any burden transferred to another professional.
The map should lead to a manageable set of changes with clear owners and measures. Test those changes in relevant settings and examine their effect on both professional effort and patient progress.
A Value Management Office can connect the initiatives with priorities, resources and project decisions. Clinical teams and other participants must remain involved in judging whether the changes improve work in practice.
“An effective professional journey supports a clinician through the complete job, from readiness to follow-up.”
Use the healthcare professional journey to examine one priority pathway. Can your team explain who performs the work, where capacity is lost and what currently limits patient progress?
Build the map with the professionals involved. Establish the baseline, test an improvement at the constraint and review the result. Patient Centered Design advances when the solution and the surrounding system make beneficial care easier to deliver reliably.
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