This article will help understand how work is applied to your org chart as superfunctions, functions, and activities, to aid with the org design process.
What do they do?
In short, superfunctions and functions are there to allow you to allocate work to the desired people or teams within your organization. Functions are units of work that can be assigned to a person as a Responsibility, or to that person's team or manager as an Accountability as the manager won't actually be completing the work but they are ultimately accountable for it.
Superfunctions are simply the umbrella that covers groups of functions e.g. if we say "Payroll" or "Funds Management" are functions, then "Finance" might be the superfunction that covers these two.
Below, we can see that while Patrice is responsible for completing the work involved in the "Payroll" function, Brita, as her manager, is also accountable for it while not doing the actual work itself.
What are activities?
To get a little more granular, activities are the units that make up functions. You might consider these the day-to-day actions that make up a function.
Using our earlier example, we can consider "Process and distribute payments" to be a component activity of the "Payroll" function. Being that little bit more detailed they can provide greater context on the work a particular person does within your organization.
