April 28th, 2020 by Thea Maisuradze
On April 23, 2020, Inflectra and #SriramRajagopalan hosted a webinar called: Why to use RACI to Manage Stakeholders? This is the 1st webinar in the Risk Management series by Inflectra. If you missed the webinar, please enjoy the recap in this blog.
Main Take-Aways:
The webinar covers the following topics:
- how to establish the importance of engaging stakeholders
- review the stakeholder engagement tools
- understanding the role that RACI plays in an organizational context
- review the patterns in using the RACI correctly.
Webinar Blog:
Risk is an uncertainty that every stakeholder faces in resource assignment, task authorization, and work collaboration. Yet, only some project managers use the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) framework to engage the right stakeholders to the right extent at the right time. Risk can inherently impact the fields of product development regardless of the project delivery framework, or client management regardless of the size of the account. But, why aren’t these fields using RACI model? As we move to higher disciplines of program management and portfolio management, the concept of risk management becomes pivotal but why is the RACI delegated only to project managers when every discipline interface with many types of stakeholders?
Several years back in a 2-day corporate workshop on organizational strategy, I saw the facilitator came up with the RACI chart and fumble on the RACI explanation confusing “A” in RACI to “Aid.” In a different situation, the vice president of a client management group was referring to give copyrights to his manager for coming up with the RACI model. I also saw the RACI matrix for a process map where the same owner was listed as both responsible and accountable and some areas had no person identified as the accountable owner. That’s when I realized that the important stakeholders should become trained on fundamentals tools of project management so that they can position the projects for success and even inadvertently don’t derail the projects.
There are several reasons why a RACI chart is required but everything revolve around addressing risks associated with stakeholder engagement. The most common ones include the large size of an organization where simple project communication tools alone would not eliminate role ambiguities. The subtle reasons for requiring a RACI becomes essential when the organization is silo-ed where several members work on similar tasks creating waste.
From a project, program, product, & portfolio management perspective, this RACI tool aligns organizational business strategy to the risks of strategic delivery and sustaining benefits through operational excellence. Consequently, stakeholders are entrusted the authority to implement to manage schedule slippage, scope creep, cost overrun, and escaped defects.
Now that we realize the importance of the RACI tool, let us ground our thoughts here in relating this tool to stakeholder and risk management! But its simplicity has created several ambiguities. For instance, how do you differentiate accountability from responsibility? What’s the role of consulted? Do we need to have all these roles in the agile delivery? How critical is the informed stakeholder(s) to a project? Based on my experience in managing numerous projects and initiatives, I have synthesized eight patterns into two categories.
Join me in this webinar as I set the foundations of RACI, differentiate the roles of these members, and describe the various patterns that can emerge requiring attention for addressing risks and engaging stakeholders.
Webinar Recording:
Please enjoy the recording of this webinar on youtube.
Webinar Presentation:
We have put together the below webinar presentation to guide your learning.
The next webinar in the series is scheduled for May 19 at 2 pm ( EDT) and focuses on How to Leverage a Risk Register to Manage Risks. Sign up here!
See you at the webinar!
