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Who Does What, When: Aligning Content Stakeholders with Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Contributed by Lauren Milly

Overview

In Blaine's presentation we learned about RACI charts. RACI stands for: * Responsible: who is responsbile for completing the task or making the decision * Accountable: who is accountable for the project overall or who must review and sign off on deliverables * Consulted: who needs to be consulted to provide input on a task * Informed: who needs to be kept informed on the projects progress

To use a RACI chart, create a table with tasks that need to be completed for your project by row. Then, in your columns assign out all of the various roles that are invovled throughout the lifecycle of your project. Next, go through each task and assign a letter for each role to indicate whether that person is responsbile, accountable, to be consulted, or to be informed.

For example a RACI chart could look like this: | Task | Writer | Editor | SME | Project Manager | |---|---|---|---|---| |Create Project Plan | I | I | I | R | |Draft Outline | R | C | C | I | |Revisons | C | R | I | I |

You can learn more and see another example of a RACI chart here.

But why are RACI charts important? I discuss that in the Takeaways section below.

Takeaways

  1. Instead of arbitrary assigning an owner to a project Blaine would have you ask, "Who needs to be involved in the content to be effective?"
  2. RACI charts are a key tool to help you and your team answer this question and manage the expectations around your projects.
  3. RACI charts are best when all roles are included in the creation of the chart, to ensure buy-in from all those involved

Reflection

My previous employer was utilizing RACI charts, particularly, within my department and we were seeing some great strides being made with them. Essentially there was some confusion, pushback, and churn over some of the tasks we as project team needed to complete on our client projects. Our internal team was made up of a project manager, a business consultant, a technical consultant, a test manager, and a test analyst. Our management team create a RACI document of all the tasks we typically complete on a project and had each team go through the RACI chart and fill it out from their understanding of who was responsible for each task. It was very interesting when we all went through our charts together! Overall, we generally agreed on most of the tasks and the tasks that we didn't agree on there tended to be some confusion over exactly what the task entailed. A handful we all disagreed on, but because we used the RACI chart we were able to see where the breakdown was occuring and we were able to start discussing why specific roles should be responsible vs consulted.

I think it is important to understand that while a RACI chart is a great tool it is not something that can be created and used in a bubble. My previous experience shows that it is a great tool to help teams get aligned so I think it is very important that all teams are included in the process of creating the RACI chart. Also, I thought Blaine's question, “Who needs to be involved in the content to be effective” is a great question that not all organizations think of and as a technical communicator I think we should start asking this of our organizations when they do not.