What is a RACI Chart?

The Four RACI Roles Explained

Each role has a specific meaning — and it matters which one you assign:

• Responsible (R) — the person doing the actual work on this task; can be multiple people for complex tasks
• Accountable (A) — the single person who owns the outcome and answers for it if it goes wrong; exactly one person per task
• Consulted (C) — people whose input is needed before the work is done; two-way communication, their feedback must be incorporated
• Informed (I) — people who need to know the result after it's done; one-way communication, FYI only

RACI in Practice: Website Redesign Example

A simplified RACI for a website redesign project:

Common RACI Mistakes

RACI charts fail when they're too complex, not maintained, or created without buy-in from the people they affect.

Too many Rs — if five people are Responsible for one task, nobody actually owns it. Break the task into smaller pieces so each R owns one clear piece.

Multiple As — Accountable must be exactly one person per task. Two people accountable for the same thing means neither is.

Everyone is Consulted — over-consulting slows decisions. If your RACI has eight Consulted parties for every task, you've built a bureaucracy. Consult only those whose input would genuinely change the outcome.

Created once, never updated — RACI should be reviewed when team members change, when new tasks are added, or when the project moves to a new phase.

Building a RACI for a Website Project

A website redesign is one of the most common agency projects and one of the most prone to accountability confusion — multiple stakeholders, multiple disciplines, and a client who often wants to be involved in everything. A RACI built at kickoff prevents most of the resulting friction.

Start by listing all major deliverables and decisions, not just tasks. 'Approve homepage design' is a decision that needs a single Accountable party — usually the client's designated decision-maker, not a committee.

For a typical 8-12 week website project with a 5-person agency team and 2 client stakeholders, the RACI covers roughly 20-30 line items across Discovery, Design, Development, Content, and Launch phases.

RACI for Remote Teams

Remote teams have a higher accountability gap than co-located teams. When nobody shares a physical space, gaps stay invisible until they become problems. RACI is more important for remote teams, not less.

Three things matter more in a distributed context:

Async-friendly RACI. Every role assignment needs to be documented somewhere the whole team can see it — not in someone's head or a private email. A shared project document or task management system where the RACI is attached to specific tasks is the baseline.

Explicit communication triggers. For co-located teams, 'Informed' often means someone overhears a conversation. For remote teams, you need to define exactly when and how Informed parties get notified — a Slack message when the task is complete, a ticket status update.

Time zone awareness. If a task is Consulted with someone 9 time zones away, the consultation adds a 24-hour minimum delay. Either reduce consulting requirements for time-sensitive tasks or plan for the async delay.

• Document all RACI assignments in a tool the full team can access asynchronously
• Define explicit notification triggers for Informed parties — don't assume they'll see updates
• Account for time zone delays when assigning Consulted roles across geographies
• Review the RACI in retro: where did accountability break down?
• Keep the Consulted column lean — fewer consultees means faster decisions

RACI Alternatives: DACI and RAPID

RACI is the most widely used responsibility matrix, but it has limitations — particularly for decisions rather than tasks.

DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) is built for decision-making. The Driver moves the decision forward. The Approver is the single decision-maker with final authority. Contributors provide input. DACI is cleaner than RACI for decisions because it separates who drives a decision from who makes it.

RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) is used in larger organizations. It emphasizes recommendation and agreement stages before a decision is made, suited to complex decisions with multiple stakeholders who have veto power.

For most agencies and teams of 4-25 people, RACI works well for project tasks, and DACI is a useful complement for major project decisions. RAPID is typically overkill at this team size.

• RACI: best for task assignment across an entire project
• DACI: best for decisions — separates who drives from who approves
• RAPID: five roles, suited to large-org decisions with multiple veto holders
• For 4-25 person teams: RACI for tasks, DACI framing for key decision points