RAPID vs RACI (RASCI, RACI-VS, RACIO, DRASCI, DACI, RATSI)

RACI vs. RAPID Responsibility Matrix

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A quick guide to understanding these two frameworks, their unique roles in decision-making, and when to use each for optimal clarity and efficiency.

The Challenge

Organizations often lack clarity as to who is responsible for task-execution and decision-making roles within processes and projects across the company. Due to this ambiguity, it becomes harder to run a process and project because of the overhead time of intercommunication. Organizations also often fail to create a leveled resource allocation according to their relevant skill sets resulting in overloaded and under-loaded resources.

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The Solution

To resolve these problems, it is important not only to clearly define the core responsibilities but also the overall scope of each role while maintaining transparency between the resources. The best practice methodologies provide several responsibility delegation levels to overcome unnecessary time & costs during activity. Responsibility visibility ensures the highest level of quality is achieved during the required timeline, while reducing the overhead of unnecessary bureaucracy. The most popular and widely used responsibility and accountability matrix is RACI and its well-known variations RACI-VS, RACIO, RASCI. A much less widely adopted method alternative approach is RAPID. While often viewed as an opponent to RACI; RAPID’s purpose is slightly different. To understand what and when to use each one, let’s first clarify their meaning and core purposes.

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How to make a RACI chart?

The concerned role draws a table, puts all the tasks horizontally and the roles vertically. After which the team determines the RACI values for each cell to complete the matrix. Ideally, there should be one and only one “A” against one task, one or more but not all “Rs” and a good number of “Cs” and “Is” to ensure communication.

Variations of RACI

RACI-VS

RACI-VS offers two extra indicators i.e. Verification (V) and Sign-Off (S). In core RACI, there is a chance of missing out any completion details against any task. To overcome any possible deficiencies in any task, RACI-VS allows marking those roles as “V” who will scrutinize the quality and correctness of a given specific task. And to supervise both “V” and “R” | “A” roles, there will be a role “S”-Sign-off who will provide the task completion verdict by approving it.

RACIO (or CAIRO)

RACIO offers an extra participation type “O” which often means “Omitted” or “Out of the Loop”. It just allows explicit mentioning of the roles excluded from the scope of a certain task. This helps in clarifying the engaged and unengaged resources in a task/project.

RASCI

“S” which stands for “Support” is a participation type which is similar to “Consult” in terms of the kind of involvement e.g. providing knowledge and resources to a task/project, but differs in the involvement duration and end goals. “Support” roles seek the completion of the task and remains actively involved throughout the task/project timeline. Whereas, the Consultancy roles do not have any such aims.

Other Variations

DRASCI: it is just like RASCI but has a “D-Driver” who centrally delegates the responsibilities.
DACI: it replaces “D-Driver” with “R-Responsible” in RACI. learn more
RATSI: it’s a further derivation of RASCI which highlights the actual “T-Task” performers which can further help in detailed Resource evaluation.

What is RAPID?

RAPID is quite different from RACI. It focuses on assigning decision-making responsibilities between different roles, unlike RACI which is purely task-driven. The need for RAPID originated with the growth of continuously evolving and collaborating hierarchies of one or more companies or teams where there are multi-level managerial and leadership roles against any single decision.

RAPID has participants who:

R: Make Recommendation
A: Establish Agreement
P: Perform and Execute
I: Provide Necessary Inputs
D: Make centralized Decisions and enforce them

RACI vs RAPID – How to choose?

Do NOT base your decision on which consulting / auditing firm you are using because they will push you towards one vs. the other based purely on their internal corporate approach standard. If you aren’t sure which methodology to adopt, best thing to do it to create a pros-cons chart based on your challenges/goals and corporate structure to evaluate which one will suit your needs best. None of the matrices can be labeled as good or bad. The effectiveness of each depends completely upon the relevance of the matrix with respect to the nature of the project, tasks and work body’s hierarchy. Then next best step is to take it on a test run with some real-world tasks, processes and projects before adopting one or the other approach enterprise wide. The test phase will quickly highlight the shortcomings of each method.

Another important heuristic to understand the applicability is to calculate the overall costs of adoption of a certain matrix and compare it to your process models to see if it is affordable in terms of time and money and can do more good than bad. RACI is usually less costly and more beneficial because usually, the task rarely is so large and complex that it would require a whole decision-making structure. Meaning if over used, RAPID can cause major decision making inefficiencies and reduce agility. Also, small to medium-sized corporations are mostly concerned with task completion and rarely make any significant amendments in the hierarchy. RAPID works better only when a certain level of experience and expertise is required to take its full advantage. Otherwise, it can become a burden and result in huge overhead costs.

Best Practice Recommendation

It is best to avoid adopting two or more completely different matrices at once. Practitioners usually go for simpler options so that all the team members can easily understand the bigger picture.

RACI is the most feasible of all the options and it makes it easier for the leaders to start from scratch and improvise to find the best-fitted variation, however, it has shortcomings within real-world situations. Hence, our recommendation is to adopt the RASCI & RACI VS extensions as part of your responsibility assignment program.

Enhancing Role Clarity with RASCI-VS in EPC

EPC supports not only the RACI responsibility framework, but it also supports the most widely used extensions – notably RASCI and RACI-VS. The “S” in RASCI represents Support roles – those that are not responsible for the completion but are highly involved in the completion of the task. The “VS” in RACI-VS represents e the Verifier and Signatory roles – both widely used for quality and compliance purposes, they are not accountable but still must sign off. The base RACI matrix is great but is too limited to cover most real-world scenarios.

EPC allows you to define different levels of responsibility, accountability and collaboration for not only processes and tasks, but all business objects managed in the system: assets, risks, controls, regulations, documents, policies, data, etc. This provides clear ownership for all areas of the business within one central system.

Setting Role ownership and all levels of your RASCI-VS Responsibility Matrix task by task can be very cumbersome. EPC allows you to set the entire RASCI matrix for all tasks within a process at the same time within a single user-friendly RASCI matrix edit mode.

EPC provides multiple easy to read and analyze summaries of your entire organizational wide RASCI Responsibility Matrix by role, by organization, by Asset or by process. Additionally, our tool can highlight and recommend “high risk areas” of the business whereby there are conflicts of Segregation Of Duties (SOD).

Organize your repository using structured hierarchies, with inherited or different accountability at all levels.

Once you’ve assigned the responsibility relationships among-st the different objects within the repository, the EPC provides many auto-generated mixed RASCI-VS swimlane or matrice swimlane maps (eg. x – role, y – asset) views based on any level of Responsibility, filtering the lanes by (R-Responsible, A-Accountable, C-Consulted, I-Informed, V-Verifier or S-Signatory or any mixture thereof. This benefits your team in two different ways: firstly it provides you with the flexibility of analyzing the same content based on different users need and, secondly, it highly simplifies maintenance because users can apply changes centrally (eg. change role name) and no manual effort is required to update the maps.

Why Choose Interfacing?

With over two decades of AI, Quality, Process, and Compliance software expertise, Interfacing continues to be a leader in the industry. To-date, it has served over 500+ world-class enterprises and management consulting firms from all industries and sectors. We continue to provide digital, cloud & AI solutions that enable organizations to enhance, control and streamline their processes while easing the burden of regulatory compliance and quality management programs.

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