RACI

Who will actually do the work?

Recently, a good friend of mine got promoted to her first management position. I found myself frequently going over various things I had learned in my decades as a manager, some obvious textbook stuff, some tricks of the trade that you sometimes learn the hard way. So if you find this series of posts about management later (which assumes someone will find these at some point) and you wonder why I bother discussing rather commonly known management concepts, that was the origin. I will occasionally repeat this intro, so apologies if you see it more than once, and thanks for reading my posts. Now, to RACI.

A RACI matrix, also known as a responsibility assignment matrix, is a project management tool that clarifies roles and responsibilities for tasks or deliverables.¹ RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. It helps prevent confusion and ensure accountability by clearly defining who does what on a project.

The RACI matrix avoids vague terms like committed or involved and helps clarify who needs to be kept in the loop about a project, who needs to give their input, who will do the work, and whose head will roll if it does not get done. The inadequacy of the terms committed and involved is illustrated by the “chicken and pig” analogy, often used in the context of Agile and Scrum methodologies, supposedly highlighting the difference between involvement and commitment. In a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved, while the pig is committed. But I’m guessing nobody wants to be the pig, while lots of people can be committed.

The order of the RACI terms is catchy but wrong. Here is the breakdown:

Accountable (A):

This is the person who is ultimately answerable for the correct and thorough completion of the task or deliverable. This person is typically the one who accepted the work and agreed to deliver it to the party needing it, with clear parameters as to how and when it will be done. For example, during a remodel, the general contractor is accountable for the work, regardless of which electricians and plumbers and others they subcontract work to and what unforeseen things may happen along the way. They can also be responsible, or they can delegate execution to others, but it’s on them to see that it gets done and they cannot use their delegates as an excuse for not meeting objectives. The accountable person is responsible for ensuring that it gets done and will face consequences if it does not. As a manager, you are accountable for your team’s objectives; as a CEO, you are accountable to the Board for the performance of the corporation.

Note the linguistic relationship to accounting. This is not accidental. You owe an explanation and justification for your decisions, actions, and results to someone with legitimate authority over you. It is not just “in charge” or “assigned the task” and then everyone moves on and where nobody matches promises to outcomes. A manager owes an account of decisions, performance, stewardship, and conduct. This account is outcome-focused, not task-focused. What makes accountability real is clarity of expectations, visibility of outcomes, and consequences (positive or negative).

While I generally loathe meetings, I am a big fan of periodic reviews such as Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) in which this accountability is actually demonstrated: What did you promise? What were the outcomes for those promises? Explain any missed promises and extra results. What are you promising for next quarter (assuming there is one)? It ties into the differences between activities and goals.

Accountability is somewhat risky: you are really not just accountable for what was agreed to, but you also have to anticipate whether what you agree to will be appreciated and whether it will create the anticipated value. A contractor who agrees to build a terrible design (and does not discuss this to make sure it is really what they want) may face an unhappy customer when it is actually built per spec.

Responsible (R):

This is the person or team who actually performs the task. These are the people who do the work, and report progress to the accountable person. If you are responsible, it means you have the duty to carry out a task, fulfill an obligation, or manage a defined area of work. Where accountability is about answering, responsibility is about doing. You owe performance of the task (completing the assigned work, delivering the outputs, and meeting deadlines and quality standards), proper care in execution (following procedures, using sound judgment, and escalating when appropriate) and timely transparency about obstacles or issues (flagging risks, asking for resources when needed, etc.).

Consulted (C):

These are the individuals who are asked for their input or expertise before a task is completed. They are actively needed for the decision-making process. These can be customers, business partners, domain experts, teams that will depend on the output, or other stakeholders. The key difference between consulted and informed is that the consulted are asked for input, and the informed are merely told.

The consulted do not make the decision, execute the task, or own the outcome. But their judgment is needed. Being consulted isn’t passive; you owe something real: relevant facts; professional expertise; identification of risks or trade-offs; but not opinions for their own sake. Consulted does not mean veto power. And you owe timely engagement, not slowing down the process unnecessarily, as well as candor: uncomfortable risks; compliance concerns; economic analysis; etc. If you are consulted and stay silent, you have failed.

Consultation sometimes gets abused, for example when it turns into de-facto veto power; when input is requested but not meaningfully considered; or when the consulted assumes the decision is already made and they simply provide justification after the fact (or, worse, cover-your-ass disclaimers and risks knowing those will be ignored).

Informed (I):

These are the people who need to be kept in the loop about the progress of the task, but they are not directly involved in the work or decision-making process. If you are in the Informed category, you are kept apprised of decisions, actions, or outcomes after they occur (or as they are finalized), because they affect your area, responsibilities, or oversight. Even though this sounds passive, you still owe something: You must review what you’re told; understand implications for you or your area, and identify follow-on impacts. Informed does not mean ignore. You don’t reopen the decision but you align around it: adjust plans, communicate downstream, and ensure consistency with other commitments. And you may still have a duty to escalate if what you’re informed about creates legal risk, conflicts with policy, or endangers financial integrity.

Can you move around in RACI?

These classifications can be fluid; someone can go from Informed to Consulted if they develop critical information that could affect the success of the project. Someone can volunteer to do work, get that work incorporated into the plan, and thereby become Responsible.

As lean as possible, but no leaner

The sad reality in large organizations is that either too many people are involved or too few. You get a dichotomy between cowboy teams who try to sneak under the radar to “get things done,” not communicating with stakeholders, sometimes blatantly competing with, undermining, or interfering with others in the organization, and with little oversight or even awareness of risks, in the middle of a bloated organization in which process and consensus culture make any initiative slow, expensive, and frustrating. Such lean counter-cultural operation is sometimes glorified (“ask forgiveness, not permission”; “move fast and break things”; “fail fast”) but can also devolve into big trouble, especially in public companies and regulated industries.

Not having the right people informed can lead to irritation and distrust, integration issues, rollout delays, or replication of work. Not having the right people consulted can mean doing poorly designed or unnecessary work, making mistakes and having to redo work, or worse. Not having the right people responsible or accountable can mean not getting the work done and not having consequences (and if that is OK, it raises the question why it should be a project to begin with). But having too many people “involved” (at any level) does not necessarily make the project better and can lead to delays, cost, and dilution of how seriously the participants take their involvement.

It is generally cheap to keep someone Informed, but over-informing comes at a cost: meeting bloat; people assuming “informed” means “consulted” and creating more work for everyone else with little benefit; people ignoring their responsibility as the informed and no one owning follow-up; people multi-tasking in meetings or not reading messages or documents that actually affect them. Over-including among the Informed is usually a defensive move: risk avoidance; political signaling; fear of surprise, desire for inclusiveness and fear of stepping on toes; lack of clarity on decision rights. Before adding someone as informed, ask whether they will care and pay attention, whether this could change their behavior or plans, whether they are expected to act, and whether they will escalate if something looks wrong. If none of those are the case, it may not be worth their attention.

It is more expensive to have them be Consulted (as they can hold up or change the project) or Responsible (the resource doing the work typically needs to be compensated for their time and needs to balance it with their other responsibilities and commitments) and if they are Accountable they better understand that their evaluation and success depends on the success of the project.

Missing from RACI: Accountable to whom?

The Accountable person in a RACI chart does not have self-originating authority. They derive it. Who gives the accountable person their mandate? Who evaluates them or removes them? That role, governance-level authority, is not operational, but it is also not optional. Different frameworks use different terms: Sponsor (owns the mandate; assigns accountability; has escalation authority); Owner (strategic authority over the domain; appoints the accountable decision-maker); Authority / Governing Body / Oversight, etc. In well-designed organizations and regulatory environments, no one is accountable without being accountable to someone else. The CEO is accountable to the Board; the Board is accountable to the shareholders, who can vote, both directly and with their investments, and to regulators who hold Boards, corporations, and employees accountable to the governing laws. When that chain breaks, you get issues like founder autocracy, weak boards, regulatory failure, and cultural collapse. And you do business with or depend on an organization in which that is the case at your own peril.

1. There is no clear inventor of RACI or obvious initial source. Some credit Edmond F. Sheehan in the 1950s, having descended from Linear Responsibility Charting, while others point to consultancies like Ernst & Young in the 1970s