When & How to Use RACI

RACI is a way to define how stakeholders align to specific roles for a project or program, which helps reduce ambiguity related to a person's involvement.

As a quick recap, RACI expands into the following (which you may remember seeing in Using the 5Ws Framework: Who):

• Responsible: people doing the work

• Accountable: people that answer for the work having been done

• Consulted: people providing input based on experience or expertise

• Informed: people looped into updates about progress and changes

It's worth using RACI when you have one or more of these:

• High complexity projects: if there are many moving pieces and/or people involved, this is a great use case for formally defining a person's role

• Cross-functional teams: each group or department may have their own norms, which may create conflicts in how decisions are made and work is done

• Rapidly growing organizations: as new people join, it's important that both they and existing staff know who is responsible for doing things and to whom they are accountable, plus how they are involved in influencing and learning about change and decisions

• Stalled progress due to ambiguity: if an initiative is underway and progress is stalled without a clear blocker, ambiguity around roles may be the culprit

If you recognize the need for having RACI, here's how to implement it:

1. Define the scope as being a specific project, deliverable, or set of decisions

2. Identify and align stakeholders to each of the categories with RACI

3. Communicate to set expectations of stakeholders around their role within RACI

Also, it's important to avoid overloading roles within RACI:

1. Responsible: limit to as few people as possible (i.e. 4 or less), as these are the doers

2. Accountable: limit to one person, as this is your decision maker or tiebreaker

3. Consulted: limit to no more than 5 people, as these are the subject matter experts

4. Informed: limit as needed based on the organization's culture

It's helpful to visualize the limits as a triangle with the letters ARCI (not RACI) written from top to bottom, where A is at the top (narrow) and I is at the bottom (wide).

You might be wondering how those limits can make any sense for large initiatives. The answer is to define RACI for the overall program and then define RACI at each project or workstream within the initiative.

TLDR: Use RACI when you're working on highly complex work, have cross-functional teams, are growing fast, or have stalled progress.