“RACI has met the common fate of other time-worn jargon: it is now misused, misunderstood, and misleading.”

One of the operating assumptions widely used in biopharma process analysis is the “RACI” model. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed, referring to what role any particular person, job or department has in a particular project or process. The point of RACI is to provide a handy structure for teams or complex organizations to sort out, and document clearly, who is going to do what. But RACI has met the common fate of other time-worn jargon: it is now misused, misunderstood, and misleading.

Unless you are a sapphire-belt sixty-sigma facilitator, the RACI model has long outlived its usefulness. Flawed at birth, its failings are ever more manifest. And yet the RACI model lives on like Tang on the Space Station.

Perhaps you have never heard of the RACI model, in which case you have been spared. Each component of the model, in actual use today (not as it was originally conceived) is problematic. It is not enough to say, “well, people just aren’t using it correctly.” If the original definitions are forgotten or are no longer intuitive, then it’s the model, the language, that has to change. This is important for two reasons: the purpose of the RACI model is still a compelling notion – not everyone involved in a process has the same responsibilities (lower case “r”!). But further, the misuse of the individual R, A, C, I words contribute to the opposite effect: people misunderstanding their responsibilities, not least because the labels are made somehow holy by the jargon. And the cost of this mistake is that reams of SOPs and other control documentation is created using the RACI model, which is then auditable, and more importantly, adds complexity and time to the very processes we are trying to make more efficient.

Let’s look first at the “R” and the “A”. “R” is supposed to be, in the model, the person who does the work – a worker, a doer. Almost no one understands this correctly. The letter R is defined as standing for “Responsible,” but the word responsible, to almost everyone, means the person who is in charge, who is supposed to lead the work, whose head will roll if things go wrong. Sorry, in RACI that is the definition of the “A” word – “Accountable”. Everyone we’ve ever worked with to try and use RACI, or has already had RACI imposed on them, confuses the R and the A, to the point where deciding who is R and who is A becomes arbitrary, and therefore meaningless. Most importantly, things that are confusing, contradictory or illogical become unmemorable, and that makes the whole RACI effort a costly waste.

The “C” and the “I” are also flawed. Can there be any less sincere roles for people than who is “Consulted” and who is “Informed”? The time spent delineating the C and the I in the standard RACI workshop is not only time wasted, it is the opportunity for more misleading behavior. Too often, people labeled “C” are people who actually should be doing something but don’t want the responsibility. They are mollified with the C, as are those who don’t want to do anything but want to be able to express an opinion about what others are doing. Should we be officially codifying such wasteful and passive-aggressive behavior? And what about “Informed”? Unless you’re working in the NSA, is there anyone who shouldn’t be informed, and is there anyone who needs to be officially informed they qualify for this obvious, passive position? The “C” and the “I” are simply a fancy justification for the phenomenon I call “everybody into the loop!”, i.e., if you aren’t actually responsible for anything, we don’t want you to feel left out, so we will keep you “informed,” and if you’re someone we’re afraid of, we will make sure you are “consulted”. This is much like everyone on the kids’ soccer team getting a trophy for “participation”. Maybe we could give everyone on the project team a trophy at the first meeting and then disinvite them for the rest of the project! I can see that my replacement for RACI should be “RDT” – Responsible, Doing something, gets a Trophy.

Because of these misunderstandings, the worst aspect of using RACI in real life is that no one is actually assigned to do any work! You can be the one who is blamed (RA), you can be the one who gets to kibbitz (CI), but no one is assigned to do anything specific, which was the original point.

There are only two roles worth delineating when designing clinical development processes: the person who governs the work, and the person who does the work. If you are re-defining or creating new processes in your research organization, there are many other techniques other than RACI that will clarify responsibilities. Stick to the two categories: Govern, and Do. If someone or some function falls into neither bucket, they get the trophy and can go home. Finance? See you at budget time. Quality Assurance? You have your own chance to Govern and Do in QA processes. IT? Make sure the intranet is working.

It’s very important to clarify roles in the multiplexed world of clinical development. The key is to clarify for the sake of simplicity, not for the sake of inclusion. Productivity over Ego; Govern and Do. Erase the RACI and get back to working smarter.