These four-letter acronyms come to us from project management and stand for Responsible/Accountable/Consulted/Informed (officially known as a Responsibility Assignment Matrix) and Risks/Assumptions/Issues/Dependencies (known as a RAID log).
Before I dove into the world of Agile, I used to spend a lot of time making these. It’s what everyone else was doing and it seemed to be a reasonable planning exercise.
Now I don’t make them anymore.
Here’s why:
The more that we assign individuals to be responsible for success, the less shared responsibility we have.
Who should be responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed about our work?
Everyone.
Everyone on the team is pitching in to do whatever it takes to achieve our goals. Though we may have expertise in certain areas of accountability, we are flexible in what we work on and share responsibility for our success. We are transparent about our progress to keep our stakeholders informed and we consult our customers often for feedback.
The biggest risks and issues are the ones we’re not working on.
Every minute we spend trying to come up with anything that could possibly go wrong and how we might solve it takes us away from what we know is actually wrong right now and working on that.
These types of tools – the RACIs, the DACIs, the RAID Logs give us the illusion of control.
The sooner we accept how much really is out of our control and embrace the inevitability of change, the sooner we can come back to reality and focus on improving.
Photo by Angie Muldowney on Unsplash