Well....very difficult! Several weeks ago I spent an entire afternoon in a meeting room with several colleagues discussing the ground rules for constructing RACI matrices and how to extrapolate them from workflow diagrams. The trigger for this discussion was the need for a coherent set of RACI matrices extracted from workflow diagrams in a consistent way and regardless of the person that does this. And although I found this a rather painful session, the outcome was very good and needs sharing (ITIL woud say: "as a good practice") with a larger audience.

Let's start - as usual - by defining what RACI is. The ITIL glossary says: "A model used to help define roles and responsibilities. RACI standards for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed" and also "Authority Matrix is synonym for RACI". In addition chapter 6 of the ITIL v3 Service Design book indicates:

The book also indicates a number of variations (read: expansions) of RACI, which we choose to ignore in order to keep things simple :-)

One of the first discussion points that we encountered is the difference bewteen R and A. As a conclusion we refined the definition by saying: Accountable is the role that is liable for the end-result of a task while Responsible is the role that contributes to the execution of a task.

So far, so good. Then we moved to a long discussion around the rules on how to construct a RACI. Combined with some rules from chapter 6 of the ITIL v3 Service Design book, here's what we came up with:

1. For each task only one role can be accountable (read: each row has one A)
2. For each task accountability is assigned/delegated to the lowest possible role in the hierarchy.
3. For each task at least one role must be responsible (read: each row has one or more Rs)
4. The role that is accountable can also be responsible (read: a cell can have both an A and an R)
5. For each task only the roles that always must be consulted and/or informed are indicated (read: a cell has a C and/or an I in case this is always applied). Be aware: this only shows the "must haves" and does not prevent additional (occasional) communication from happening

And finally some ground rules for extracting RACI matrices from Workflow diagrams:

1. Each swimming lane in a workflow diagram indicates the role that is accountable for each of the activities within that swimming lane
2. A hierarchy of workflow diagrams (also called "nested workflows") also implies a hierarchy in roles (read: delegated accountability). E.g. at a top level workflow model the accountability for an activity can be assigned to the incident manager, while for a sub-activity within a lower level workflow model accountability is assigned to the first level support role.
3. The swimming lanes at the lowest level workflow diagrams also indicate that the role is responsible for each of the activities within that swimming lane (read: for that role these activities show as A, R in the RACI). Please note that there might be more roles responsible for these activities, which is then only shown in the RACI and not in the workflow diagrams.

To close this off, I would like to invite you to add any other good practices you might have in constructing RACI matrices. Thanks in advance!

Regards,
Jeroen Bronkhorst