Building Process - Step 1, who does what?

RACI, DACI, RASCI, RAPID.... what's the goal? Let's not spend half the meeting getting everyone aligned on the differences between Accountability and Responsibility - again!

As we started building process in our company, we naturally tried out various frameworks.

Every time a process failed, we’d analyze and as we started to get proactive with building process, the exercises began with working out who does what.

We settled for a short while on RACI, which has the four categories:

Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed.

It sounded logical but listening to some of the default reactions when things didn’t go as planned led to phrases like this:

"What's the difference between Accountability and Responsibility in RACI, again?"

“I wasn’t Consulted”

“I wasn’t Informed”

“I didn’t sign off on that”

and the list goes on. (Add your favorites to the comments below!)

Even on Google when you search for RACI, the second most asked question is “what is the difference between accountable and responsible in RACI?”

So what’s common with all of these (and more) reactions?

What’s common here is that they are all reactive phrases. Which means no/low buy-in. And so without real buy-in, we tend to work on our own things and throw out some easy defense mechanisms (phrases) like some of those above. Real easy to deflect.

That was a problem for us, because we want to help remove inefficiencies and continue to Grow the Tree 🌳.

So we simplified, and came up with an easier model, centered around these 3 (not 4, or 5!). We call it AVA.

1. Accountability - who’s has to ensure it gets done.

2. Visibility - who has access to see things.

3. Approval - who has to sign off.

Just 3?? Yup, that’s it.

There’s a little nuance on these and how we came up with them.

For Accountability, we know that as a growing and matrixed organization with many teams and people, working out who is responsible can befluid and a project in itself at times. We asked “why do we care, we are are all here to work as a team to help get the goals achieved”. We are all responsible because we are all able to respond.

For Visibility, we didn’t like the “I wasn’t informed” or “I didn’t see that” excuses so instead of centering the Consulted and Informed categories around what the process/project needs to do, instead we opted for Visibility. Who can see it? Who has access?. This makes things actionable and easy for our teams when they look at sharing files and information.

For Approval, what we found with RACI was that there was no clear explanation of who signs off, so we made it explicit.

So there’s our model - AVA - Accountability, Visibility, Approval.

Use it if you like, or make your own. Just make sure that your team understands it and doesn’t take half of each meeting debating the differences between each category.