Are you struggling to organise and streamline your project management process? Then, this article is for you. Confusion around the participant roles and responsibilities will cause significant issues, irrespective of how detailed and comprehensive your project plan is. However, clarity about the duties and roles is important for achieving project success. Here comes the RACI matrix.
RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) is an easy, possible way to determine project people and their responsibilities. Comprehensive charts show who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed in every project phase. Integrating this model into the project life cycle cultivates a strong synergy that effectively improves project outcomes. Let’s dig deeper into this and understand the rules of the RACI matrix and how you can adopt this.
What is the RACI Matrix?
The RACI Matrix is a chart that shows the tasks, milestones, and important decisions regarding assigning team roles across the four categories. It determines the people and responsibilities of the people in the project. The categories suggest whether a project stakeholder is responsible, accountable, or should be consulted or informed about the tactic, goal, or decision.
In most project initiatives, the lack of understanding of people’s roles and responsibilities remains similar. Hence, cultivating a consensus by adopting the RACI matrix helps keep the project moving and allows the main stakeholders to actively deal with other problems.
RACI Matrix Categories
RACI matrix elucidate the roles and responsibilities of people in a project. The matrix ensures that every task has the specific roles to finish it. The four categories under which the stakeholders are placed in a project include:
Responsible
This category of RACI matrix includes stakeholders who perform and complete the tasks. Hence, many people can be considered responsible.
Accountable
Those people or stakeholders who own the work are categorised under this. These people need to ensure that responsibilities are assigned for all the relevant tasks in the RACI matrix. The particular individual should be accountable for leading the success.
Consulted
Those people or stakeholders who need to provide feedback before the completion of work and sign off. These people are in the loop and actively engage in the project.
Informed
This category categorises the people or stakeholders who should be informed and involved. They should be educated about changes in progress or tactics. However, there is no need for formal consultation but these stakeholders should contribute to the jobs or decisions.
What is RACI’s Golden Rule?
RACI’s golden rule is clarity about accountability. As discussed, only a sole individual can be accountable for any initiative. In several projects, responsibility and accountability can be conflicting or confusing, mainly when those responsible for the project completion are empowered with broad decision-making abilities. The key difference between responsible and accountable rules is that although they are responsible for decision-making while completing the project, only one individual genuinely owns and signs off on the job.
How to Create A RACI Matrix?
An effective way to develop RACI matrix includes six crucial steps
- Step 1: You need to decide on the tasks included in a project and make a list. This can be particularly impotant for the IT initiatives that involve the key deliverables and PLC steps
- Step 2: The next step is to find out the project stakeholders and enlist them at the top of the chart.
- Step 3: Fill in the RACI matrix cells, finding out who’s responsible and accountable for each task and who will be consulted and informed.
- Step 4: You should confirm every task has at least one person responsible for the activity
- Step 5: No task should include multiple stakeholders accountable. Deal with the conflicts where there is more than one stakeholder for a single task.
- Step 6: At the beginning of a project, share, communicate, and reach a consensus on the RACI matrix with the stakeholders. This includes resolving any disputes or issues.
RACI Matrix vs RASCI
RASCI is another form of responsibility assignment matrix commonly used in project management. It includes the same four categories as RACI matrix, but an additional’ supportive’ segment. The ‘supportive’ segment in RASCI consists of those people who help the Responsible category. This could be additional resources, expertise, or advice that Responsible people need to complete a specific task. Those organisations that go for RASCI model often ensure that all people regardless of their involvement in the project as a responsible or accountable person play a role in the project process. The individuals or organisations that communicate on a particular project phase can be a suitable example of supportive category.
RACI Matrix Rules and Best Practices
Creating a simple RACI matrix is insufficient, but you need to ensure that the matrix maps out a roadmap to project success. Some best practices and golden rules that you should follow include:
- Every project activity should include a minimum of one responsible party
- Every task should have single Accountable person to ensure proper decision-making
- Every project member should perform a duty in every activity
Dealing with conflicts and uncertainty in RACI matrix is all about focusing on every row and column. These are the following cases, where you can use RACI matrix:
Analysis for Every Stakeholder
- You should check whether too many responsible people are included in the RACI matrix. This means a single stakeholder having too many project tasks to do.
- Next is whether the people should be assigned with multiple tasks or not. You should observe whether responsible can be changed to consulted or consulted can be altered to informed.
- Finally, it is important to evaluate whether every stakeholder entirely agrees with the role that they are assigned in the project process. Such a consensus can help in charter and reporting of project.
Analysis for Every Project Life Cycle Step
- The first step to form a RACI matrix is to analyse who is performing the task in this step and getting things done.
- Are there too many people responsible for keeping things running?
- Who is accountable, and there should be only one accountable person for every step of the project life cycle.
- Is there a conflict regarding decision rights. Stakeholders with accountability must have the right to make the final decision on how the work will be done and how the conflicts will be resolved.
- You should analyse whether all the stakeholders should be involved or not. Are there any benefits of doing this?
- Should all the stakeholders be regularly consulted, or can they be kept informed. Too many stakeholders to be consulted can really slow down the project speed.
- Finally, check whether all the stakeholders are included in the model. This helps in addressing the important things in a project management process.
Summary
Overall, RACI matrix is an effective tool that offers true benefits. It is the integration of the model with a particular project life cycle that ensures that the project is well structured for success. The four categories help in managing the roles and responsibilities effectively. This reduces the chaces of conflicts and confusions in a project process.
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