EA Collaboration Tools: RACI Charts.

I’ve spoken a bit recently about Enterprise Architecture as a collaborative tool, rather than a command and control structure. Talking about collaboration is good, but it takes more than a desire to collaborate to move EA in that direction. In reality, collaboration is an intentional effort, not just something you do by getting a group of people together and talking about architecture. While that’s a key first step, and one you can do right now to improve your current landscape, collaboration is a culture which must be encouraged and fostered and which requires stronger leadership than any command and control structure ever does. But I don’t want to talk about the soft skills of leadership today. Instead, I’d rather talk in this and another post or two about tools that make EA Collaboration a richer and deeper experience. By tools, I don’t mean modeling tools, repositories or frameworks. Those things have their place, but EA is also about people, and the tools of which I speak are tools that help people work together. These are common, simple tools that don’t cost an EA team much, but which can add a good bit of value to your efforts.

The first is a communication tool called a RACI Chart. A RACI chart is a simple device used to describe  the roles and responsibilities of a group of people in completing certain tasks or deliverables. An example of a RACI chart from Wikipedia is depicted on the left and illustrates tasks or deliverables as rows (what is being worked on) and roles as columns (who is working on it). At the intersection of each task and role is a letter (R, A, C or I) to represent a role’s level of involvement in a task. Here is the meaning of each letter:

• Responsible – The person who does the work. (There can be multiple)
• Accountable – The person accountable for the completion of a task, or the "single wringable neck." (There can only be one)
• Consulted – A person or people with input into the task. Their expertise is needed.
• Informed – A person or people who "need to know" the outcome, but who need not be consulted during the process.

So why is this valuable to EA? For me, the reason is because it removes assumptions and brings clarity to collaboration. RACI charts enable a group to go into a process or task with a clear understanding of everyone’s role. Differences of opinion over the level of involvement are resolved up front, which makes it that much easier for a group to move forward on the "same sheet of music" so to speak. Without clarity, you usually create conflict around contribution (bad), rather than conflict around content (good).

Here’s an example of a RACI chart that lists some common Architecture deliverables (both Enterprise- and Solution-level):

I won’t go to deep into the content here because the deliverables and roles don’t apply to every organization. For that matter, neither do the structural and cultural issues that play into "correctness" of this particular chart. The key is to recognize that the chart clearly identifies Rs, an A, Cs and Is for each deliverable listed as they relate to various roles in the organization. On the occasions where I have leveraged this method in the past, I was encouraged by the clarity it brought to the teams with which I was working. On one occasion, I was told that this model helped one individual put his finger on some past frustrations he had around certain deliverables and also understand with clarity how he "fit" into these cross-functional decisions.

Of course, these charts are no substitute for open and honest discussion and they should never be used as a way to manipulate people. They are intended to bring clarity and should be used only to obtain it. Once you’ve got it, it’s time to move on to the task art hand, which you’ll do with a lot more clarity than you would have otherwise.