How the RACI Model can help you and your team define roles, ownership, and accountability on your path to successful project management.

Have you ever been on a project team where you were not sure of your role? The team didnt know who could make decisions? Or you got to the end and realized that you left out a major stakeholder that could have improved the solution. We hear this often when we are working with our business clients, and when we do we walk through the RACI Chart.

The RACI model is a well-known model used by many organizations including TEAMES & CO, to help leaders define who is: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed in any given scenario. It provides a framework to outline roles and responsibilities for projects and teams. As roles are defined, it can help team members to become more effective, create clear team accountability, and ensure a comprehensive solution as key stakeholders are consulted and informed along the way.

So how do you build a RACI?

We will use a project — moving your team virtual — as an example.

R— Responsible. This will be the team member who’s actually doing the task or work. If there are sub-tasks there may be a point person for each task. For example, lets think about a team moving from in-person to virtual work. Everybody has to be responsible for their shift into the virtual space. Then there are also going to be supporting tasks. For example, who handles identifying communication tools or who’s responsible for identifying IT needs when they’re offsite, etc.

A— Accountable, you move to the person who’s going to be signing off on the project. So what you want to think about, is who is your executive sponsor or the team leader Who is making sure at the final decision point that the work is complete? Also, if there is a change, who signs off on new key deliverables, dates, and decision points?

Pro Tip: Knowing your key deliverables, dates and decision points will help you build your meeting cadence and roadmap.

So that’s responsible and accountable, and now we will move into the C and the I, which are: consulted and informed, or as we call them: Consult and Inform.

C— Consult group are the various stakeholders that will be in the meetings. They will share their insights and perspectives about how this change is going to affect other processes. You will want to identify cross-functional teams that you work with. For example, you may have Human Resources to help you identify, “Do we need more training? And if we do, what does that look like?” Are there customer communications? If I’m managing a customer support team and we’re all moving to virtual offices — are there other teams we have to work with on the move? The consult group may include IT as you may need a VIOP phone system. It may include sales. If there is a new process for Customer inquiries they should be not only informed of, but be able to provide feedback on that process. You will most likely consult finance to be sure you are within any project budgets. The consult grooup will most likely be the group that has the most stakeholders. This is great as it means you are engaging many stakeholders in the process, which will help optimize the process during the planning stage.

I-Inform is still a very important group but these stakeholders may not be in the meetings with you. The inform group will be team members and stakeholders who need to know about the changes but are not a member of the project team.

For example, you may work with a tangential team and not on a daily basis. In the virtual work project, they may want to consult facilities but then also they will need to inform them on decisions of timing, total number of team members, and if any people will have a split schedule i.e. hybrid work .Facilities may not be in every meeting, but it’s important for them to know the outcomes. You want to make sure you’re keeping them up to date with the process as you’re going forward, so that way you’re aligned.

There can also be external stakeholders. If there is a change to a customer-facing policy you will want to inform customers. This should be early and often, so they are not surprised by the change and can adjust their expectations.

Now the RACI is not the only model for creating a matrix of responsibilities. And over time different people and organizations have modified to fit their team’s needs.

Many organizations use variations of this model. These are not set in stone, and every organization is going to have a different need and different stakeholders. Some of these variations created include RACI-VS, which is a model that also includes a Verification step and a sign-off point person. There’s RACSI with an S included, in the case you are outlining Support teams. Organizations take different approaches to this widely used tool, and have made modifications to best fit their processes.

There’s no end to how you can personalize this to your team, but hopefully, this gives you a starting place. We did not invent this tool, but we find it helpful when identifing stakeholders and assign roles.