The four roles
- Responsible (R): the person or people who do the work. There can be several.
- Accountable (A): the single person who owns the result and signs it off. Exactly one per row.
- Consulted (C): people whose input is needed before the work is done; two-way communication.
- Informed (I): people told of progress or completion; one-way communication.
How to build one
- List the tasks, deliverables or decisions down the left side.
- List the roles (not names, where the role is stable) across the top.
- Fill each cell with R, A, C, I or leave it blank.
- Check every row: one A, at least one R, and not too many Cs.
- Check every column: a role with As in every row is a bottleneck; a role with no R or A may not need to be there.
- Agree it with the people named, then review it when the work changes.
A worked example
For a corrective action from a quality non-conformance: the production supervisor is Responsible for implementing the fix, the quality manager is Accountable for closing the non-conformance, the maintenance planner is Consulted on the equipment change, and the site manager is Informed at the Tier 3 meeting.
Common mistakes
- Two people Accountable, so neither is.
- Everyone Consulted, so nothing moves.
- Names instead of roles, so the chart dies when someone leaves.
- Built once for the audit and never looked at again.
RACI and daily management
A RACI is a snapshot of who owns what; the daily management system is where that ownership is exercised. Every action on a tier board has one owner (the R) and is reviewed by the meeting leader (the A). Where a RACI shows a task has no clear owner, the board will show it as the action that keeps slipping.