Glossary
What is a RACI matrix?
A grid of tasks or decisions against people or roles, marking for each who is Responsible for doing the work, who is Accountable for the result, who must be Consulted before it happens, and who is Informed afterwards.
Its value is one rule: exactly one Accountable per row. Responsibility can be shared — several people can do the work — but accountability cannot, because an answer owed by two people is owed by neither. A RACI that does not enforce that rule is a list of everyone who is interested.
What the four letters mean
Responsible is whoever does the work; there can be several. Accountable is the one person who answers for the outcome and signs it off — often the person who delegates to the Responsible, sometimes the same person. Consulted are those whose input is needed before the work or decision goes ahead: the communication runs both ways. Informed are those told afterwards: it runs one way.
The line that matters most in practice is between Consulted and Informed. Consulted means the work waits for an answer; Informed means it does not. Marking someone C puts them on the critical path, and should be done as sparingly as that implies.
How to build a RACI matrix
List the tasks, deliverables or decisions down the side, at the level where handovers happen and not every activity. List people or roles across the top; a role is acceptable only if exactly one person holds it. Place the A first, exactly one per row, and resolve any row where two people both believe it is theirs — that conversation is the main reason to build the matrix at all. Then add R, then C, then I.
Read it both ways when it is done. Across each row: is there one A and at least one R? Down each column: does one person carry so many letters that they are the bottleneck, or so few that they need not be in the meeting? Then check it with the people named, because an Accountable who has not agreed is not accountable.
Common failures and variants
Two Accountables on a row, usually as a compromise between departments, which recreates the ambiguity the matrix exists to remove. A team or a committee in the A cell, for the same reason: an owner is a person. Everyone Consulted, so that nothing can move without a round of meetings. And a matrix written at kickoff and never opened again while the real assignments drift.
The variants adjust the letters, not the principle: RASCI adds Supportive for people who help the Responsible without owning the work, and DACI — Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed — recasts the grid for decisions instead of tasks. All of them are static. A RACI says who answers for a kind of work; it does not say whether a particular piece of it has an owner who has agreed to this scope and this date.
Related terms
- Vertical work — A delivery stream owned by a single team or discipline that produces end-to-end value within its own lane — frontend, backend, data, mobile, platform.
- Horizontal work — A cross-cutting concern that pulses into several delivery streams at specific gates — security review, legal, compliance, design, accessibility, privacy.
- Readiness (three-state) — A planning dimension has three states, not two: not assessed, assessed and nothing found, and assessed with items.
This definition comes from building DeliverySheet — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date.
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