When your day is filled with 10 to 50 projects with a tight deadline, it’s only natural that you lose track of what you are doing, and get caught up in a whirlwind of tasks that might not be so important or urgent for the day or the week.
While most of us have our day well planned, we too often get distracted by unplanned activities and distractions that seem to pop up out of nowhere. This invariably leads to extended deadlines, mediocre performance and drop in quality of work.
That often happens to me. I get pulled into a discussion or meeting that was not part of my plan (but was part of someone else’s) for the day and end up engaging in and executing the action points of that plan or project. And, at the end of the day, I can’t remember what exactly I accomplished in a day’s work and whether I was even supposed to do the tasks that I did!
It is very easy to get confused and make incorrect assumptions about who has to do what.
Having a clear well-defined role and job description is essential for the functioning of an individual or a team with maximum productivity. Guided by your roles and responsibilities, you have better focus and you maximize your capabilities and contribution as a whole.
The RACI Matrix is a simple and visual tool to show a team's functions clearly. RACI is an abbreviation for:
R – Responsible: Who is working on the task at hand?
A – Accountable: Who makes sure the task gets done?
C – Consulted: Who advises about how the task is to be carried out or done?
I – Informed: Who is updated on the status of the task?
This matrix tracks people or roles in business activities, defines accountabilities of team members and gives stakeholders a clear understanding of the team.
Applying the RACI Matrix in PowerPoint Project Management at Chillibreeze
The core function of Chillibreeze is PowerPoint presentation formatting and design services. It is crucial for the production team that they produce quality work without missing deadlines.
In a day, the production team of 33 handles up to 1000+ PowerPoint slides. This is not an easy job, especially when the design requirements vary from one customer to the other.
How can the team make the best use of time and resources?
Using the RACI matrix in PowerPoint project management, the team has clarity on responsibilities and projects are executed systematically. Repetitions are ruled out and every task has someone responsible for it.
How does Chillibreeze ensure that the PowerPoint projects are handled with care by the stakeholders?
- The Manager is responsible for the team’s functioning and ensuring that all projects are executed in time as planned.
- The Account Manager is responsible for customers and for making sure that the team understands customers’ requirements.
- The Point of Contact is responsible for receiving projects, project management and allocating resources.
- PowerPoint Designer is responsible for designing slides as requested.
Let us put the stakeholders in the RACI matrix table.
The stakeholders will go to the left of the table in the first column.
Next, add a column on jobs to be performed when designing PowerPoint slides.
In this case, there are four steps in executing PowerPoint projects:
- Receive project
- Execute
- Quality Assurance
- Dispatch of project
For each of these steps to run smoothly, the stakeholders are held responsible.
Using the four abbreviations RACI, mark the empty cells.
Here is what the table looks like:
| Stakeholder | Receive Project | Execution | Quality Assurance | Dispatch of Project |
| Manager | A/I | |||
| Account Manager | R | I | A/C | A/R |
| Point of Contact | R | A/R | A/R/C | A/R |
| PowerPoint Designer | R | R |
R=Responsible; A= Accountable, C=Consulted, I= Informed
It is now clear who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed.
The table helps clearly define the roles of each team member and you can also see who is doing what throughout the process all at times.
If someone is doing more than three things at one time, then there must be a problem with how that person is assigned a role or there could be a problem within the process, and that might not be productive for the whole team.
When it comes to the production team, it can get hard to differentiate the roles because when the team is overloaded, everyone becomes R-responsible. In such situations, the RACI table makes sure this does not happen. Like I said earlier, if we want to deliver top-notch quality service, we need to differentiate roles. Who does what, and what starts and ends where.
The RACI Matrix is the best tool to keep track of teams’ activity and role, and team members do not lose track of their core responsibilities.
Have you made use of the RACI Matrix in team building?
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