Racing to get stuff done

Racing to get stuff done

Have you ever received an email that was addressed to two or more people, and by addressed we mean the to field, not carbon copy or cc as it is more known. Most typically that email came from someone who wanted something to be done. Let’s roll some bones and take a wild guess, when you received that email that went to you and say 3 other colleagues, who of you felt the instant need to do what was asked? Or did you all look at each other and assume that the person next to you would do it? You don’t need to answer it here out loud but it’s a fact that tasks that have no clear assignee don’t get done. Did you know that Apple’s Steve Jobs was relentless in assigning tasks to only one person?

This is where the so called RACI model kicks in. The somewhat racy sounding acronym RACI stands for: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. This means that people are divided up based on their responsibility in a specific topic. RACI allows employees to know what is expected of them in a specific task, decision or plan. Based on their role they know what they have to deliver and the roles allow decision making to become more informed and seamless.

Let’s start with the responsible person. He is basically the work horse. This is not to be confused with the role of the accountable. In simple terms the accountable has his head on the line and must ensure that the responsible person does and can do their job.  The responsible does the actual work and the accountable oversees that this work is in accordance with things like company policies, overall strategy and legal frameworks.

The accountable creates a sort of work peace for the responsible so the responsible person does not have to worry about the bigger picture but can focus on getting the issue at hand done. In order to do this he needs the consulted people. Consulted is whoever has valuable insights to offer. A simple example for this is event planning. The marketing team in a company might plan which events to attend but they need to consult the sales team to ensure that the events support sales. Consulted people are crucial in creating the best possible outcome because their insights are invaluable.

This distinguishes them from the informed people. Informed is something like FYI (for your information). This means those people according to the RACI methodology are informed that something is happening but nothing is expected from them.

The RACI model initially comes from project management and software development but has implications that reach far beyond these matters. In fact it is part of the many processes and structures in software development that the business side can implement and learn from. Is your organization operating based on the RACI model? Let us know your experience in the comments.