A responsibility assignment framework that defines four roles for every task or decision: Responsible (does the work), Accountable (owns the outcome), Consulted (provides input), and Informed (receives updates).
RACI exists because organizations are bad at answering a basic question: who decides?
The framework maps 4 roles to every task or decision. Responsible is the person or team doing the work. Accountable is the single person who owns the outcome and has final decision authority. Consulted means their input is sought before a decision. Informed means they receive updates after a decision is made. The constraint that makes the framework useful is that only one person can be Accountable for any given task.
The framework is decades old and widely known. That doesn’t mean it’s widely followed. Most RACI failures happen in the space between building the matrix and enforcing it. Teams create the document during the project kickoff, everyone nods, and by week 3 decisions are being made by whoever shows up to the meeting or sends the loudest email.
The consulted bottleneck
The most common RACI mistake is marking too many people as Consulted. Each Consulted person is a scheduling dependency: the decision can’t move forward until their input is gathered. When 6 people are Consulted on a platform configuration decision, a task that should take 2 days takes 2 weeks.
The discipline is distinguishing between people whose input changes the decision and people who want to be involved. The first group is Consulted. The second group is Informed. Telling the second group they’re Informed instead of Consulted is a conversation most project managers avoid, which is how bottlenecks persist.