Why RACI Fails

“RACI” is a responsibility assignment matrix, especially used in management where participation of various roles exists for the completion of an assigned task. This enables managers to participate and discuss a common task and maintain absolute clarity to obtain a desired outcome. Suppose you have a project which needs completion, and which would have participation from different functional teams, it would be apparent that you would have various roles within the task.

Defining the roles and responsibilities is critical for its success. This is important for the following reasons:

1. Focusing on the key objective; away from non essential distractions
2. Decision making concerns need to be addressed
3. Blame Games where things may stray from desired path need to be avoided
4. Workload Imbalances have to be managed
5. Lack of action because of incomplete or ineffective communications to be prevented
6. You-we-they attitude to be avoided

Take a scenario where a small application would need to be developed. This project in its various phases would need to have a members with various skills, such as functional and designing skills, development skills, testing skills, transition skills etc. While there would be only one project manager, across the development phase, people with different skill sets would have responsibilities for various aspects of the project. So you have the project manager who is accountable and different team members responsible for various components for the project.

At the same time the project may need expert advice from a functional or special skills who would fall under the category of people who are the “Consulted”, while there would be people who may need to be kept informed of the activities of the team Take for example, a QA tester has been assigned the role of testing the program. His manager may need to be kept informed of the duration for which he would be part of the project so that, any planning which he may require to do is done.

Thus we see while you may have multiple people assigned various roles, the roles could be easily defined. So the RACI matrix is as follows:

Responsible: Many
Accountable: One
Consulted: Many
Informed: Many

The basic concept is to ensure that there is no dilution accountability while ensuring that scenarios listed above do not derail projects.

That’s the theory. The problem in many situations is that the RACI matrix does not give clear guidelines for devolution of authority. To be able to carry out any role, there are certain powers of decision making which need to be provided. You cannot have any responsibility without some corresponding authority. It’s like having duties without rights.

So you have situations where people with responsibility are left wondering as in the words of George Carlin “I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it.” The RACI concept is great but the human element which it aims to address, sometimes becomes the greatest stumbling block.