Let's Get Racy

This is how to best avoid a clusterf#ck when starting a new project with lots of different people involved.

I’ve spent most of my career in small to medium-sized business. It’s ranged from one person when working for myself (the ideal size according to the brilliant book Company of One), to 60 full-time staff at Junkee Media, and around a hundred or so at the various advertising agencies where I cut my baby teeth learning the dark arts of gentle persuasion.

There are generally two types of workers: “big company” and “small company” people. Of course, some clever folks can transition between them both, but whenever we hired new colleagues to join us at Junkee - totalling hundreds of (mostly) wonderful people over 15 years - we’d spend a lot of time trying to figure out through the interview process which type of person they were. Trying to squeeze the wrong type of person into the wrong size of company failed more often than it worked.

And then, in 2016, Junkee was bought by a larger company with close to 1000 employees. As someone who was used to making a decision in the morning and executing it in the afternoon (and, yes, then sometimes giving up on it the following week due to the fast pace!), that was a huge, almost incomprehensible, number of people.

I found acclimatising to a company of that size fascinating for the four years I was there, and anyone working at a larger company (I mean, I can’t even comprehend mega companies with tens - hundreds! - of thousands of employees) would be familiar with some of the pain points:

• Constantly introducing yourself in meetings to new people

• Deep grooves of embedded culture that can be stubborn to shift

• Learning how to “circulate” ideas to get people on board before starting anything

• Figuring out how to use whatever new employee program is the flavour of the month

• Working to ensure genuine collaboration isn’t just an empty value on the wall

• Trying to avoid the meeting after the meeting (Brené Brown is the queen of this fruitful topic).

• Drowning in Teams and Slack notifications

• Over communicating so everyone knows what you’re up to

• And on it goes

It can sometimes feel like big companies have more processes, models and systems than people. My first reaction was to fight against it: what a waste of time! So much red tape! Couldn’t this just be an email?!

And then, during one particularly large cross-company project that involved multiple people from different departments, levels and interests, it all kinda clicked into place for me. Oh! This is why the processes are so intense. All of a sudden the use of forms, and Powerpoints, and checkboxes started to make sense. Some big company processes might seem like a waste of time, but there are few brilliant ones that are actually useful, and this one below is one that I keep returning to, over and over, no matter what project I’m working on.

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One Useful Thing for February 2023: RACI Matrix

The RACI Matrix (it’s pronounced as “racy”, which makes it seem a tad sexier than it is) stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. It’s a simple and popular model used to clarify who is doing exactly what on any project that you’re working on. If you’ve ever worked for a big company, you might already be familiar with it, but there’s still a lot to learn about how to really use it properly.

A RACI aims to solve the clusterf#ck situation where lots of people are working on a project, but no one has any idea who is doing what and you all end up doubling-up on tasks and re-doing things and hating everything and everyone around you.

Sound familiar? If so, it’s time to get racy / RACI. It also solves a potential problem, particularly in bigger companies, where you get to the end of a project and you realise that your boss’s boss, or even their boss’s boss, hasn’t been brought on the journey and could kill it all with a single email.

So how do you avoid this? For every project that you do, you should set up a RACI. It’s a simple matrix with a column across the top of the page for each person who is involved in the project in some way. Then running down the page are rows detailing each of the key tasks or deliverables.

This is what that looks like:

You then fill out the RACI by going through each of the tasks and deliverables, and clearly allocating who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed for each aspect of the project.

Responsible: This person, or it can be a group of people, is directly responsible for the success or failure of this part of the project. It’s their job to keep everyone on track, and really they should be the ones setting up the RACI in the first place. The buck stops with them, and they are the engines that’s going to keep everything going. You can assign responsibility to more than one person, but I’ve found that it’s best to keep this list of people as small as possible, at the risk of having an entire cohort of people who are all designated as “responsible” as a way of sharing the risk.

Accountable: This person, or again can be more than one, is generally the person that the Responsible person above reports into. That’s not always the case, but the Accountable person is someone who looks over the work that those with responsibility to do the work are actually doing, and ensures its all on track. If the project goes off the rails, it’s the role of Accountable person to ultimately, well, be accountable for its success. They are usually more senior than those in the Responsible column.

Consulted: This is a person, or group, who is not directly involved in the project, but will ultimately be affected by it in some way. They might work in a different department or team, but will have valuable insights they can add into the process to help it be a success. People who are consulted are asked for their advice, and given regular updates, but are not responsible or accountable to the project. There’s a real great value in this column of getting input into work from people who aren’t as emotionally involved or close to it, so this is a really important set of people who should be treated as such.

Informed: The last group are the people who need to be kept across the project at a high level, but don’t have as much input into it. This might be an Executive Team, Board or Heads of Departments who have some interest in the output and success of a project, and should be kept informed, but that’s about it.

Why this is useful: A lot of processes can be overkill, but the RACI Matrix is one of the models that I just keep returning to at most projects I do. It might be a small project involving just a few people, or a large multi-company one that touches dozens of people.

Often just the act itself of gathering everything together who’s working on a project and clearly articulating who is doing what is worth it alone.

How to use this: Think of any project you’re working on right now. If there’s any confusion about roles, then draw up a simple RACI Matrix to clarify it.

1. On a blank page, or Excel doc, draw up a column for every person involved with a project, using the example matrix above as a guide.

2. In the rows, write out each of the tasks, or deliverables, that are involved with the project. These can be as high-level or detailed as you need.

3. Gather everyone together who’s working on a project and, collectively, fill out each of the columns, assigning who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed for each of the tasks. I’ve created an example below so you can see how to fill it out properly. This should bring any issues to the surface around who is meant to be doing what.

4. Document it! Make sure you capture exactly what each person has been assigned, paying particular attention that there’s not too many people in Responsible or Accountable.

5. Circulate the document after the meeting so everyone is across it.

6. Finally, refer back to the document if the process ever falls down. If someone is not doing what they said they would, call it out. You will at least have an agreed document you can use to ensure the conversation remains productive and focused.

Here is an example of one filled out:

You can already see how clear it is for each person on the project to know exactly what they have to do.

The RACI Model has saved me a lot of heartache over the years, and is one of things I’ve most grateful to have learned during my time inside a larger company. If you’re working across multiple companies on a project, you can also add the names of the companies into the columns instead of individual people for clarity.

I’m sure there are lots of other processes you find useful, so would love to hear some of yours in the comments below or via reply email.

Thank you to everyone for reading or sharing last month’s Out Useful Thing to over 5,000 people (!). I genuinely loved every email reply, comment, social share, company forward and Slack re-posting. A reminder that the Google Drive link that I shared is a live folder, and there have been over 30 new presentations added since I sent it around, so continue to return to it again and again for even more insights and presentations.

Twenty Twenty Free (Trends & Predictions)

I’m currently in Australia for a few weeks of workshops and events, and to spend some time with the smart independent publishers who are part of the Digital Publishers Alliance that I chair.

After that my husband and I will be spending the next few months in Bangkok, Mallorca and Mexico City (a perfect trio of cities if you ask me). As we are slowly moving around, the first draft of my next book on the future of work is taking shape, and I think it’s honestly the best thing I’ve ever written on such an important topic that affects all of us. But more on that later.

I’ll be back next month with another useful thing for you.

Have a great February.

Tim

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