Most RACIs are paperwork. The strongest are forensic instruments. This one is built to surface accountability problems in time to fix them, not in the post-mortem.
Rows are decisions, not workstreams. Each row has exactly one Accountable (one human, not a team), the Responsibles who do the work, a deliberate Consulted list, and the Informed roster. The format forces the question that prevents two-VPs-disagreeing-quietly incidents.
Who decides? What happens if the decision needs to be made on Tuesday and the Accountable is on vacation? The cheat sheet covers how to use the test to spot the rows that will fail before the program does.
Most PMs let the Consulted list balloon to twenty-three people. The result is decisions that never get made. The guide covers how to spot a C list that is really an I list, and how to cut it without political fallout.
The four letters, the two most common failure modes, the script for telling someone they have been moved from C to I, and the escalation rules for when an A goes on vacation.
One purchase, yours to keep. Use it on every program, customize for your team. Works in Excel and Google Sheets.
I once watched two VPs make the same decision differently in the same meeting. One said the launch date would be the first of the quarter. The other, twenty minutes later, said the date would be the middle of the quarter. Neither contradicted the other. Neither noticed. By the time the discrepancy surfaced a month later, two teams had built work products toward different launches.
The PM had everything she needed to prevent that incident. She just didn't have a tool that forced the question of who actually decided what.
"RACI is a forensic instrument, not paperwork. Used well, it surfaces accountability problems that look like stakeholder problems, and it surfaces them in time to fix them."
Most PMs make two mistakes when they build a RACI. The first, and the more damaging, is leaving the Accountable ambiguous. Two A's, no A, "the leadership team," or "we'll figure it out together." Each is a future incident, waiting for the moment a decision has to be made and there is no agreement on who makes it. The second mistake is letting the Consulted list balloon. Every senior person who might want a say gets added on the theory that being inclusive is safer than being exclusive. The result is that no decision gets made, because by the time you have circulated a draft to twenty-three people, two have given conflicting feedback, three are on vacation, and one has changed roles.
For each decision in your RACI, you should be able to answer both in one sentence:
Most RACIs in the wild fail one of these two tests. Building one that passes both is the whole point of the template.