Role

A role is the job a person performs while owning a Process or performing a Practice. A person can have multiple roles, but they perform only one role at any one time, and only one person owns a role.

Remembering the small number of staff in SMEs and especially in VSEs we try to keep the role model simple, even though multiple roles can be mapped to a person anyway. We don’t want someone reading Guidance for 12 Roles to work out what they do.
ARCI matrices are too complex for Core Practice?

A Role describes a job that someone needs to perform. A Role can own some Processes and perform some Practices. A person can have multiple roles, but they perform only one role at any one time, and only one person owns a role. The Practices they perform are not necessarily part of Processes they own.
Ownership is about being the manager or overseer of that process and taking ultimate responsibility and accountability for how it is performed.

Performing a Practice is about the actual doing, while being answerable to the owner of the Process.

We group roles into Primary Roles, and Secondary Roles. Primary Roles will be separate people in an organisation big enough, and only get several roles assigned to the one person in smaller organisations. Secondary Roles are "hats" to be worn by people, either people filling the Primary Roles or others.

There is an obvious default Primary Role for each of the Secondary Roles, but we split them out. It would be a large business where there were separate people for each of these Secondary Roles - each will generally be assigned to one of the Primary Roles.
We will indicate where these might be best assigned, but circumstances will vary. So these additional "hats"to be worn are additional roles to give you the flexibility to put them somewhere else.

For example, in most businesses the Security "hat" will be given to the IT Manager, but in others Security may be less IT-centric (e.g. an outdoors company with expensive plant) or more critical (e.g. one handling money or personal information) so the hat fits better somewhere else. Or the boss may decide the Governor role has quite enough to do and choose to delegate roles such as Quality and Legal.