Defining project responsibility in team environments
It’s very rare to find people not working in some kind of team structure when it comes to website development.
While skill set limitations and time constraints often present significant project challenges, working in teams is a great way to leverage a broader range of skills and achieve a higher standard of quality than one person alone could achieve.
But what makes an effective project team? I’ve seen people sitting around a table at the end of the meeting scribbling down a list of ‘next-steps’ only to meet up again a week later, the project floundering due to miscommunication, lack of accountability and lack of clarity on who was supposed to do what. Luckily there’s a relatively easy way to save hours of circle work on your project by employing a doing a simple RACI Matrix at the end of each project meeting.
RACI is an acronym for:
- Responsible - Who is responsible for the execution of the task?
- Accountable - Who is accountable for the tasks and signs off the work?
- Consulted - Who are the subject matter experts who to be consulted?
- Informed - Who are the people who need to be updated of the progress?
The example below shows how each team member can be allocated a letter indicating their status/task in relation to a project component, providing a point of reference for how each deliverable should be treated by each team member in order to progress.
While the provided example below is relatively straight forward, it should be noted that a team member may be allocated more than one category of task in order for all of the necessary project steps to be completed.
The beauty of the RACI matrix is that for a fairly small investment of time it can help avoid situations where responsibilities and accountabilities aren’t clear, reduce duplication, identify gaps and lessen overall project uncertainty.
So next time you sit down to nut something out with your team, why not give the RACI matrix a try and see what difference if can make to the efficiency of your project?
