RACI matrix: settling who decides before the project needs it

A RACI matrix maps tasks against roles and puts one of four letters in each cell: Responsible for the person doing the work, Accountable for the single person answerable for the outcome, Consulted for those whose input is sought before the decision, Informed for those told afterwards. It takes an hour to build and prevents the two failures that cost projects the most — work nobody picked up, and decisions three people believed were theirs.

The letters matter less than the conversation. Filling in a RACI forces someone to say out loud who approves the budget and who merely has views about it, which is a conversation most teams postpone until the disagreement is expensive.

What the four letters mean

• Responsible — does the work. Several people can share this on one task.
• Accountable — answerable for it being done properly, with the authority to decide. Exactly one per task, never two.
• Consulted — asked before the decision, two-way. Their input is genuinely sought and can change the outcome.
• Informed — told after the decision, one-way. No approval, no delay.
• Blank is a legitimate value. A role with a letter on every row is a role that will be in every meeting.
• Rows are tasks or deliverables, not job descriptions — "approve the design", not "design work".
• Columns are roles rather than names where the team is larger than a handful, so the matrix survives people changing.

One A per row, always. Two Accountables is the single most common error and it recreates exactly the ambiguity the matrix exists to remove — when both believe the other decided, nothing happens; when both decide, they conflict. If two people genuinely share accountability, the task is two tasks.

Building one in an hour

1. List the tasks and deliverables that need a decision or hand-off. Twenty rows covers most projects; a hundred is a matrix nobody reads.
2. List roles across the top, and keep the list short — a column per person in a large team makes the grid unusable.
3. Fill in the A first, one per row. This is where the real discussion happens, so do it with the people involved rather than alone.
4. Add R next: who actually does the work.
5. Add C sparingly. Every Consulted is a delay you are agreeing to in advance, and generous consulting is how projects become slow.
6. Add I where people need to know but must not block.
7. Read each column aloud. A role with letters everywhere is over-involved; a role with none should not be in the project.
8. Circulate it and let people object — an objection now is worth ten later.
9. Revisit at each phase boundary, because accountability moves as the project moves.

Where RACI helps and where it does not

It is at its best on work crossing team boundaries, on projects with an external client or supplier, and anywhere a hand-off has previously gone wrong. It is close to useless on a team of four who sit together and already know who does what — there, the matrix is ceremony. It also cannot fix an absent decision-maker: if the person marked A is never available, the matrix documents the problem rather than solving it, which is at least a start.

Ettex Sheets is the natural home for the grid: import an existing XLSX with formulas intact, dropdown validation so cells only accept R, A, C or I, conditional formatting to colour the letters and — more usefully — to flag any row that does not have exactly one A, filters to read the matrix by role, and cell comments so a disagreement about a cell is recorded next to it. Version history shows how accountability changed between phases. The project plan around it belongs in Ettex Docs, the tasks themselves live in Ettex Board with assignees and due dates, and the people behind the roles sit in Ettex Contacts.

Plainly: Ettex has no project-management module in the formal sense. There is no RACI feature, no automatic validation of the matrix, no dependency or critical-path calculation, no resource levelling and no Gantt scheduling engine. It is a spreadsheet with validation and a board for the work. That is proportionate for most projects; a programme of many interdependent workstreams wants dedicated PM software.

A matrix is one way to lay this out; the content is the harder part. Roles and responsibilities have to name activities rather than titles, put numbers on every threshold, and say who holds the decision when the owner is away.

How RACI matrices fail

• Two Accountables on a row, which reproduces the ambiguity it was built to remove.
• Consulted used generously, turning every decision into a round of meetings.
• Rows written as areas of work rather than as specific decisions and deliverables.
• Names instead of roles, so the matrix expires the moment someone changes job.
• Built by one person and never circulated, which skips the argument that was the point.
• Filed after kick-off and never revisited as accountability shifts.
• Applied to a small co-located team, where it adds ceremony without removing confusion.
• Used to assign blame afterwards rather than to clarify beforehand — after which nobody fills one in honestly again.

Two adjacent artefacts stop the matrix becoming decoration. A stakeholder register records who the people actually are rather than which roles exist, and an escalation matrix says what happens when the accountable person is unreachable.

A RACI matrix is one hour and one rule: exactly one Accountable per row. Fill in the A column with the people involved, be mean with Consulted, and revisit it when the project changes phase.