Who Does What?
Posted by admin on Aug. 13, 2024 / Subscribe 0
Photo 1. Braveheart movie poster (Taken from Redbubble)
One of my favourite movies is the Braveheart, an epic movie released in 1995. It was a breathtaking movie indeed, I can recommend as a must watch on your playlists. I was a teen at those times and I remember that I had told to myself while following the generics: “Hundreds of people having different roles, what a great production crew behind it”. Even after a few years, when I had the internet infrastructure arrived at our apartment, I recall myself looking for film crew to understand who does what on a movie set: There were a lot of people working in different steps of a movie production. At that era I couldn’t have completely grasped meaning of all those roles and responsabilities but later on when I started my journey in project management I realized what it truly means; has become a great reference for me years after watching it.
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Who Does What?
If you take a look at a film crew thinking about who does what during each production phase (for a brief overview here is a good reference: careersinfilm), you can find out that there are different roles and responsabilities performed by each crew member depending on the phase film production is in.
Can you imagine the huge mess where responsabilities are not clearly defined at all? Loss of money? Unavailability of resources in the nearest term?
It is identical at projects we all work in, there are many stakeholders like a film crew. In order to eliminate confusion and delay in your project, the best tool to use is a responsability assignment matrix (RAM).
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Responsability Assignment Matrix (RAM)
This matrix serves as a guideline for stakeholders to clearly define the scope and responsabilities so that no one interfere and/or leave out tasks.
Its widely recognized form is called RACI chart (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). There is also another form RASCI (Support function added) in case needed.
Let’s have a brief look at each letter:
R for “Responsible”: Team member who is supposed to complete the task assigned.
A for “Accountable”: Team member who ensures tasks are completed correctly by assigned responsible at defined time. This person can also be the responsible but it is not necessary all the time; what important is every task
C for “Consulted”: Generally a subject matter expert whose expertise is consulted by responsible of the task.
I for “Informed”: This can be a team member or even a stakeholder out of project team which needs to be informed about the progress of the activity.
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It’s essential that every activity has an accountable team member assigned. Sometimes a team member who is accountable can also be responsible to conduct the activity but an accountable person shall not be defined as informed.
For waterfall approach projects, responsabilities are generally mentioned in Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) dictionary during scope and schedule study. For agile approaches, user stories are used instead of WBS dictionary and responsabilities are distributed among development team members.
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A Few Tips
A responsability assignment matrix is essential and inevitable for project managers in order not to have a micromanagement approach of daily tasks assigned to project team members. I recommend to do it, either not to skip nor tp ignore.
For project managers it is one of the sources to understand the workload on each team member so they can report and/or consult to functional managers for prioritization and/or avoid multi-tasking.
You may encounter following situations: A project where there is no RAM defined (so you can imagine the chaos). Or projects where a RAM is available but team members do not follow it due to different reasons. Each situation is a different case study and has different actions to take.
On the other hand, a RAM can not cover every situation team members might face during a project life cycle, therefore once there is lack of clarity, every related party shall gather and decide how to proceed.
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The lesser the conflicts about roles and responsabilities, the more opportunities to conduct more smooth project phases. Have a nice journey ahead.
Koray Tokol |
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