Blog by Railsware

8 Reasons to Use a RASCI Chart on Your Project

RASCI chart guide
Human super-power is the ability to organize ourselves in groups and do great things together. But with this super power comes the necessity to organize our mutual work. Even a small project like a Sunday picnic with friends can become chaotic, if it’s not properly managed by the most responsible friend. And more complex projects, like building software products, will simply fail without proper organization.

There are many tools that help to organize projects, processes, and own tasks, such as ToDo lists, Kanban boards, spreadsheets, task management systems, chats, emails and various communication tools. And they all can be pretty effective. However, oftentimes, when organizing work, we do not think beyond the “task assignee” concept as we associate a task only with a person who’ll fulfill it.

More than that, most common project management tools usually have one field for an assignee, which also gives the impression that there are no other roles apart from the person who does the task and, perhaps, a manager who can answer questions or provide details.

But the reality of modern projects is much more complex, and many more people are involved, usually implicitly. This is where a responsibility assignment matrix (RAM), like RACI or RASCI, comes in handy. Such a matrix takes into account all the roles involved and makes it clear what roles and people are involved and in which way. In this post, we talk about the most popular responsibility assignment chart, benefits a team can get when using it, a step-by-step instruction to create such a chart for your team, and some RASCI matrix examples from our experience.

What is a RASCI chart

RASCI chart is a popular management tool to categorize participants and define their roles and responsibilities within a project or process. The origin of the tool is clearly unknown. However, it is often associated with the project management approach called “Goal Directed Project Management” (GDPM) that got its fame in the 1980s after the publication of Kristoffer V. Grude, Tor Haug and Erling S. Andersen’s works. 

RASCI is a more modern version of the original RACI chart that was meant to define responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed stakeholders for each critical task on a project. The difference between RACI and RASCI charts is in the additional role (supportive) that the RASCI chart acquired over the time. Here’s what each role means in a RASCI chart:

This model is very flexible, and based on the project size and nature some roles can be added or omitted. At Railsware, we use the RAtSCNIuo chart with some extra roles which we will discuss a bit later.

How a RASCI chart looks like

A classic RASCI chart consists of project tasks that are listed in the left column, while all the team members necessary to complete a project are mentioned in the upper line in the chart, and the roles that the team members hold are indicated as letters – A, R, S, C, and I.

As you can see from the chart, one participant can hold different roles on different tasks of one project. For instance, a CTO can approve some tasks, be consulted and informed on other tasks.

8 reasons why you need a RAM on your project

When creating a RACI or RASCI chart for your team, you get a powerful tool for efficient project management that contributes to smooth cooperation in cross-functional teams. Below are the things that a RASCI chart brings:

1. Simplified communication 

Without knowing who is responsible for what, a team will eventually face misunderstandings, mistakes, and sometimes even conflicts. It happens when new members join the team, when workers are engaged in several projects, or when one specialist passes their work to another one. With a RASCI chart, all team members have a single source of information they can address throughout the entire project. 

2. Fast decision-making

A responsibility assignment matrix clearly defines who is the Responsible and Approver of a task, which then makes it obvious whom to contact for implementation and decision-related questions.

We’ve tried and tested multiple decision-making frameworks over the years, and made sure to let you in on our thoughts. Check out the linked article where we put them in action with the same use case.

3. Better work coordination

When all the roles are clear, each team member knows what tasks they are responsible for, and whom to contact for which questions, they can start working straight away. Responsible people are aware of who they should consult, who will approve their task, what to do next, and what’s the goal and expected result of the project. They understand the workflow and don’t waste time searching for the necessary stakeholders.

4. Risk mitigation

The development of a RASCI chart requires you to decompose the project into smaller chunks of work and share responsibilities among team members. By doing so, you see the scope and what part each specialist is responsible for, which decreases your chances of missing something. It also shows whether you have enough resources/talent to complete the project.

5. Better workload distribution

The chart is also easy to analyze to see how many areas of responsibility each person has. It’s a simple way to determine if a team participant has too many responsibilities and, if so, prevent specialists from burning out or leaving some tasks incomplete by redistributing the workload.

6. Saved resources

RASCI chart allows for a more efficient workflow that reduces reworks, pauses, duplicated tasks, or, conversely, non-completed tasks.

7. Easier to manage changes

The Agile development methodology lets teams adjust project scope during the development. When using a RASCI chart, a team can easily track who will be affected by each change and how team members’ workload will vary.

8. Fast conflict resolution

A RASCI chart adds to the project management transparency. With this tool, you know the expected outcome from everyone, to which everyone committed. The chart allows a team to track back who was Responsible for a non-completed task and understand where blockers appeared. Such analysis is helpful in detecting bottlenecks and preventing them in the future.

Simple steps to create a RASCI chart 

If it’s the first time your team is creating a RASCI chart, follow the steps described in this paragraph and make it formal. Later on, you may not need to formally create it because everyone will know the process. Here are the steps to follow to create a responsibility assignment chart that your team can successfully apply:

A chart itself is a handy tool. However, you shouldn’t ignore other project management tools and approaches that improve project coordination and team governance, like project management systems with assignees, dedicated communication channels with project participants, regular meetings with a team, automated business processes for budget approvals, etc.

Railsware experience with a RASCI chart

Our team has a long history of creating and using RASCI charts for both inner and external projects. Over the years, we have defined some additional roles that allowed us to distribute roles and responsibilities more accurately and achieve better outcomes. As a result, we have developed a RAtSCNIuo model. The RAtSCNIuo chart stands for responsible, approver, team, supportive, consulted, if no one else, informed, user, and occasional user. Let us explain what the new roles mean.

Not all projects require us to use all the listed roles and attract that many people, though. Each project is different. On some small projects, we may only have a Responsible and Approver.

When we create a responsibility assignment chart

It’s not mandatory to create the chart each time. Sometimes, the simpler approach works. It means you can define and confirm what role each person holds, and that’s it. No need to have the list of the tasks and the chart itself. Besides, you won’t always know the list of tasks in advance.

However, in case you think you’ll need a chart, you should start with the project’s priority. If a project appears to be less valuable than others in the queue, creating a chart for it is a waste of resources as the project needs to be postponed and, therefore, the chart is likely to be outdated by the time the project starts.

When we deal with an existing project, we create a RASCI (RAtSCNIuo in our case) chart if: the scope changes and we need to re-allocate the roles/scope; when the team composition changes and everyone needs to be reminded who’s doing what; when we see communication issues, people are lost and need this clarity.

In case of a brand new product development project, we create a responsibility assignment chart during or after the BRIDGeS discovery session. BRIDGeS is a flexible decision-making framework designed by Railsware that helps form a product vision and build a clear development strategy during one session. Find out more about BRIDGeS and the advantages a team can get using the framework.

RASCI chart examples

The Railsware team uses a RASCI model for every project that is large enough. Let’s take a look at some real-life examples from the experience of our team. 

Case 1. Organizing yearly summit

Every year, our team runs a yearly summit. This is an offline gathering that lasts a week where we get to know each other in person, build connections, collaborate, and have fun with our teammates and families.

Considering Railsware is a remote-friendly team with people from thirteen different countries, the organization of the yearly summit is a big and significant deal. The event organizer has to solve a number of problems and think through a lot of questions, like:

and many, many other questions. The scope is obviously huge. This is why we used a responsibility assignment chart to distribute responsibilities and ensure everything would go smoothly. The questions we listed above formed a list of tasks which we placed in the left column in a RASCI chart.

Role 1Role 2Role 3Role 4Role 5
Decide and agree on the destination of the event
Check the travel rules for a chosen destination
Define the number of participants
Organize the transfer for each teammate
and their family members 
Find suitable accommodation for all participants
Create an agenda with various activities for any taste
Estimate and approve  the budget

Sergey, as a Managing Director, held the role of an Approver along with Agata, the Chief Financial Officer, who validated all financial questions. The Project Lead Anastasia, was the Responsible. She had to drive the project and was liable for its outcome.

The Responsible attracted a few colleagues (specialists in different areas with relevant experience and desire to participate in the project) to help her with the research, transfer organization, agenda, and other aspects crucial for the summit. They held the Team role. We contacted Railswarians who participated in organizing Yearly Summits in the past and who could help us with a piece of advice to be Consulted.

During the project, we set up several polls and discussions with all Railswarians to find out their opinion on one or another aspect related to the trip. Those who shared their ideas and suggestions also acted as Consulted. All Railswarians who decided to attend the summit became Users.

Additionally, we collaborated with an external travel agency responsible for buying tickets, booking accommodation and finding different services providers according to the event agenda. Those obtained the Supportive role.

Here’s how the final responsibility assignment chart looked for that particular project.

Managing Director
(Sergey)
CFO
(Agata)
Project Lead
(Anastasia)
Project teamExternal travel agencyExperienced peersRailswarians
Decide the destination of the eventAIRTCcC/U
Check the travel rules for a destinationIIATsI
Define the number of participantsIAT
Organize the transfer for every personIARSU
Find suitable accommodation for everyoneIATSCu
Create an agendaAIRscU
Estimate and agree the budgetIARTS

Case 2. Developing user management feature for Mailtrap

Mailtrap is a Railsware product aimed at safe email testing in dev and staging environments. The tool was initially created as an MVP for the needs of our team. When Mailtrap proved its viability, our team allowed other developers to use it as well. Now, the tool has more than half a million active users and is extremely popular among both individual developers and various agencies and companies.

Mailtrap is actively growing, and our team is regularly consulting our clients to find out what functionality they lack. The more corporate clients we got, the more often we were requested a user management feature. Before, users could share access to some parts of the system manually. That was enough for individual users or small teams of 2-3 people. At the same time, agencies have many more system users, so the manual user management process took a while.  

When we saw the real need for this feature and realized its value for our corporate clients, the team decided to give it a go. Before the project started, we created a RAtSCNIuo chart.

Sergey, our Managing Director, and Yevgen, a Mailtrap Product Manager, held the role of Approvers. Julia, who is also a Product Manager on Mailtrap, agreed to become a Responsible. To develop the feature, we attracted one backend and one frontend developer. We also required assistance from a content writer to work on UI texts. These specialists were the Team on the project. While all our designers in the company were busy with some urgent tasks, we contacted an external design agency to assist us with the UI/UX of the new feature. Last but not least, project participants were Mailtrap users who tested the feature and shared their feedback.

Here’s how the responsible assignment chart looked for this project.

Managing Director (Sergey)Mailtrap product manager (Yevgen)Product Manager (Julia)Team (developers and a content writer)External design agency Mailtrap users
Create user stories for the featureIARTC
Estimate the scope of workIARTC
Develop the backend part of the featureIARTI
Develop the frontend part of the featureIARTI
Create the design for the featureACRTC
Write texts for the feature UX IART
Test the feature with real usersIARIIU

Case 3. Upgrading error messages on the Plans & Pricing Page

This case is also connected with the Mailtrap product. Mailtrap offers its users a free subscription plan and several paid ones. Our data analyst constantly checks the conversion rate and detects aspects that have a negative impact on it. After one of the inspections, we found out that the error message free users saw when trying to use a paid feature was confusing and turned customers off.

Clients not only couldn’t understand what features they might use and which features were unavailable, but they also didn’t see the value a paid feature could bring and, thus, didn’t have an incentive to upgrade their subscription plan to a paid option.

To solve the issue and increase the conversion rate, our team initiated a corresponding project. The Approvers remained the same as on the previous project (Sergey and Yevgen) as well as the Responsible (Julia). We also required a content writer to create new, clear and appealing texts, a designer, front- and backend developers, and a data analyst for this project. All these specialists held the role of the Team.

Our team contacted a native speaker to check out texts and make sure they are straightforward and can’t be misinterpreted. This person held the role of a Consulted, as it was a one-time job. Also, we shared our findings with the team of marketing experts, as they might be interested in the project results. So, we added them to our responsibility assignment chart. Here’s how it looked.

Managing Director (Sergey)Mailtrap product manager (Yevgen)Product Manager (Julia)Team (developers, designer, data analyst, content writer)Native speakerMarketing teamMailtrap users
Clarify the issue with customersIARIIC
Create a tech task for a content writerARTI
Proofread text to ensure it’s clearIARC
Create the design for this messageIART
Develop front- and backendIART
Check conversion after messages updateIARTI
Run customer interview to get feedbackIARTIU

All these charts helped us to launch, manage, and successfully finish each particular project. To create the charts, we followed the steps shared above and some best practices you also need to know about.

Do’s and Don’ts when creating a RASCI Matrix

Wrapping up

A responsibility assignment chart is a relatively easy-to-use tool with a bunch of significant advantages. Developing a chart doesn’t take a lot of time, especially if you’ve done it before. When using a RASCI chart for your project and your team, the most important rule is to make sure that a person agrees with the role and responsibilities they were assigned. Also, it’s totally ok to modify the chart and tailor it to the needs of each particular project, as our team does. 

If you want to know more on how Railswarians compose teams, ensuring a high level of engagement and motivation, read our blog and subscribe to our Youtube channel!

Exit mobile version