This month’s article is all about RACI charting. What is a RACI chart? How can it help project success and other organizational initiatives? Let’s start by looking at a few common scenarios posed in this excellent guide by Royston Morgan from UK-based Project Smart.
RACI is an acronym that stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.
A RACI chart is a matrix of all the activities or decision making authorities undertaken in an organization set against all the people or roles. At each intersection of activity and role it is possible to assign somebody responsible, accountable, consulted or informed for that activity or decision.
When you hear these types of comments in an organization a RACI Analysis may be overdue:
- ‘My boss always overrules my decisions whenever she wants’.
- ‘The approval process for even the simplest item takes so long today’.
- ‘It seems everyone is putting together a spreadsheet on the same data’.
- ‘Things are always slipping through the cracks’.
- ‘I have the responsibility, but not the authority to get the job done’.