Using RACI and ResultsManager
Here’s something else I’ve been trying to figure out lately…
I can’t believe that I’ve only recently discovered the project management technique of the Role Assignment Matrix using RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). It seems that I should have stumbled onto that much sooner. I think it’s going to change my life and the lives of those around me–time will tell 
Anyway.
As I begin to use RACI for more and more role clarification on projects and activities, I’m interested to see how I can incorporate it into ResultsManager. It would be nice, for example, to see on a relationship dashboard with one of my direct reports, which things he is an “A” for (accountable–buck stops here), and what things he is strictly an “R” for (responsible–the ‘doer’). Because I rely on ResultsManager so much to give me views into my world and and the worlds of those I manage, it would be nice to add these new bits of information from RACI onto my dashboards, instead of managing that information outside of ResultsManager (likely a spreadsheet) where it will likely fall out of sync.
I could that easily if there were simply some extra fields on a ResultsManager activity that had corresponding dashboard filters that could be used to group/sort/filter activities by RACI role.
In the meantime, I’m going lo-tech and simply including role information as a text comment at the top of the comments field in each activity. So it’s there when it comes time to review activities. But it doesn’t give me any flexibility for automation of group/sort/filter. I’m trying to learn to live with “good enough”.
October 13th, 2007 at 4:49 am
Hi Mike — RACI is a great approach for building some clarity of responsibilities when you have big cross-functional project teams.
I think it may be possible to capture and process some of this information in ResultsManager. For any task or project you can have the Resources field set as:
R: ActivityManager, ActivityProvider, Partner@
You can look at the ActivityManager as Accuntable (A), the ActivityProvider as Responsible (R), and the Partners as a combination of Informed/Consulted and then build dashboard templates that act on these filters.
October 13th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Hmm… Yes, something like that had occurred to me the other day. Meaning, I looked again at the two ownership paradigms for ResultsManager (Delegated or Shared), and wondered if perhaps moving to Shared might give me a degree of freedom in how I use that Resource field that I don’t presently have using the Delegated model.
But since I’ve relied so much on delegation and inheritance of ownership, and done so much dashboard customization, I’m a little nervous to just “flip the switch” to Shared Ownership…
Can you offer any guidance on using Shared Ownership?
On the other hand, it sounds like your (ActivityOwner) comments may be assuming Delegated mode…so maybe it’s more of an issue of how I interpret what I’m already using rather than using something else?
October 13th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I should’ve just read the ResultsManager help doc before that last post. After reading, I can see that I really just need to understand the Roles model better. There’s a great diagram that shows how the varies roles of Party, Owner, Activity Manager, Activity Provider, Activity Owner, and Partner work together. That really clears it up. I infer from reading that, that this hierarchy of roles really only makes sense within the Delegated Model.
So I’ve got some tweaking to do…
October 13th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Yes — “Shared” model is the antihesis of RACI approach.