Who Does What, When: Aligning Content Stakeholders with Clear Roles and Responsibilities¶
Contributed by Niklas Curle
Overview¶
Presenter Blaine Kyllo talks about the eternal problem of ownership in content strategy. Who exactly is the owner of a project in a group if no one can agree to take ownership? In his own definition he defines owners as those that need to be involved for the content to be effective. Owners work best when their work is specialized into one area and they aren't stretched thin with multiple responsibilities. Conversely, if no one wants to become the owner then the project won't be completed. This definition obviously must involve than one person, so the scope of ownership expands as well.
With the definition of ownership changed to everyone with a stake in the project, he introduces his method of assigning people roles and responsibilities. It's called a RACI chart:
- R stands for responsible
- A stands for accountable
- C stands for consulted
- I stands for informed.
These are the characteristics that employees have for different tasks, e.g. a person can be the accountable party for a particular task. Down the left side of the chart are the different tasks required for the project, and stretched across the top are the different job titles. An example:
| Task | Chef | Owner | Manager | Waiter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finances | R/A | I | ||
| Cooking | R | A | I | |
| Operations | A | R |
(Resource: Markdown Guide Extended Syntax)
You then fill in the cells with a letter depending on the employees level of engagement with the task.
Key takeaways¶
As technical communicators, we work with other teams in our company to develop documentation. It's important that everyone knows their role, otherwise there will be conflict over responsibilities. This presentation talked about a method that can prevent this from occurring and will set the team up for a successful project. Particularly for technical communicators which often have little formal power, this activity can make us more included in the entire project process. For example, before this activity other teams can forget to consult us about a task they were doing which later could lead to a bad outcome. If we were instead identified as consultants for that particular task at the start, we may have been able to remedy the problem come up with a good solution.
Reflection¶
This might be a stretch, but I thought back to learning HTML elements and how every structural and semantic representation imaginable has an element for that purpose. If you use elements the right way, your document will be better because it is more accessible and editable. Just like how determining the different responsibilities in the RACI chart leads to a clear web of relationships and a better final product, if you apply elements in HTML the right way the content can be understood by more people and makes editing easier.
A RACI chart is similar to an audience analysis in that you have to identify the relevant stakeholders and their role. Some people can be identified as the primary audience and are considered vital stakeholders in the project, so if their needs aren't met the project is considered a failure. This can be directly compared to the people in the RACI chart that have the Accountable responsibility. Blaine mentioned how there should always be one person accountable for each task. Otherwise, the entire project can collapse. Other parties are less important and only need to be informed but they still need to be included in the project's design.