RACI Chart · Responsibility Assignment Matrix
Responsible · Accountable · Consulted · Informed
What is a RACI chart?
- Four roles: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed
- Exactly one A per task
- Too many Cs slow decisions
Once you draw a RACI sheet, the language in meetings changes first. Agenda items that used to be brushed aside with “Let’s work that out as we go” get settled by a single question: “Who is A for this?” The value of the table lies not in dividing up the work but in concentrating decision rights in one person. For the people doing the work, too, it helps tell apart who must approve from who just needs to be kept in the loop, so there are fewer cases of copying ten people on an email and getting no reply.
In practice, the boundaries that cause the most confusion are R versus A, and C versus I. A is assigned by authority, not by rank. The person who spends the budget, signs the contract, and would explain a failure externally is A, so it is practical to split A by amount or risk level: for example, the team lead for KRW 5 million (≈ US$3,740) or less, the division head above that. C and I are a matter of timing, not of a person’s importance. If someone’s opinion is needed before a decision, they are C; if they only need to know after it is made, they are I. When a single task has more than four Cs, that task almost certainly runs late. To break the decision-making stage itself into parts, some use variants such as RAPID or DACI, but for most organizations a single RACI sheet is enough.
The most common failure is writing a team name, such as “Sales,” in the A column instead of a person. A team is not accountable. When something goes wrong, the team lead points to the owner, the owner points to the team’s decision, and a week disappears. The second failure is pushing every A up to an executive out of caution. As the approval queue grows, people on the front line ignore the chart and go back to the old way. A RACI is a document you open when a dispute arises, not just when you create it. So don’t bury it in a shared folder; update it in the same place whenever tasks change. A chart drawn once and then left alone drifts away from the real work within three months.
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Ara LimSpecialist in global leadership, AI, and business communication| Role | Meaning | Headcount | Common mistakes |
|---|---|---|---|
| R: Responsible | Does the work | Can be several people | Leaving a task in the plan with no R |
| A Accountable | Approves and owns the result | Exactly one person | Listing two As, so accountability disappears |
| C Consulted | Consulted before the decision | Keep it minimal | Too many slows decisions |
| I Informed | Informed after the decision | Either direction | Inviting Is to meetings wastes their time |
It took shape in 1970s U.S. consulting practice as the Responsibility Assignment Matrix, and spread after the Project Management Institute (PMI) included it in its project management standards.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case: Company A makes auto parts, and 300 of its 420 employees are production workers. To comply with the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, it had to rebuild its safety training system within 3 months, and the previous quarter’s completion rate for statutory training was only 51%. The notice had clearly gone out, but the floor supervisors said, “We didn’t know it was ours to follow up on.”
- At kickoff, we broke the work into 14 tasks and filled in the A column first. The HR manager said, “I’ll take A for vendor selection,” but signing authority for the contract sat with the head of Business Support, so we corrected the A on the spot.
- They split A by amount. For items with textbook and instructor fees of KRW 5 million (≈ US$3,740) or less, the HR team lead is A; for items above that, the head of the Management Support Division is A. The CEO was moved down to I on all 14 tasks.
- We trimmed the C column too. On the vendor selection task, all three production team leads had been listed as C. We kept only the production engineering lead as C and moved the rest to I, and the ten days spent gathering input dropped to three.
- Reading the table vertically, 11 of the 14 Rs were concentrated on one person, Assistant Manager Kim in training. They handed R for the 3 on-site practice sessions to each plant’s safety manager, leaving Kim in charge of only course design and evaluation.
- Three months later, the statutory training completion rate rose from 51% to 89%, and average approval time fell from 9 days to 3. Rework caused by “I didn’t know it was mine” dropped to zero.