We have multiple departments involved in our client onboarding process, and we are struggling to assign ownership of the onboarding cycle time metric. How do we determine who owns a scorecard number when the workflow is cross-functional?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Cross-functional workflows are the most common source of scorecard friction. When a metric slips, departments often point fingers at each other. The sales team blames operations for slow onboarding, while operations blames sales for delivering incomplete files. To resolve this, you must look at your Accountability Chart and assign ownership to a single seat. You cannot have shared ownership on a scorecard. If two people own a number, nobody owns it. To find the correct owner, ask who has the ultimate authority to change the process and solve the bottleneck. While multiple seats touch the workflow, one seat must be accountable for the final outcome. For client onboarding, this is typically the head of operations. Even though they rely on the sales team for clean data handoffs, the operations seat must own the onboarding cycle time metric. If sales is delivering poor inputs, the operations owner must bring that issue to the Level 10 Meeting and use IDS to solve it with the sales leader. The scorecard owner does not have to do all the work themselves, but they are fully accountable for reporting the number and leading the charge to fix it when it is red. This structure forces cross-functional collaboration because the metric owner has a strong incentive to work with other department heads to keep their number green.