RACI Model — Stakeholder Management & Analysis For Product Managers
Why do we need RACI?
Stakeholder management is one of the key responsibilities for product managers.
Product managers often need to set up new processes or workflows for a business area, and most of the time it will involve multiple stakeholders. Having a chance to implement a new process across teams is great exposure. But without a framework to guide your relationship with different stakeholders, you will risk spending too much time on communicating with stakeholders, when it is not often necessary. Or even worse you might miss out on some of the important feedbacks. This is when RACI comes into play.
What is the RACI model?
The RACI models assign stakeholders into the following roles:
R: Responsible. It’s you. The person who runs the project.
A: Accountable. The decision-maker. Who’s head will roll when things go south?
C: Consult. The go-to person you’ll ask for an opinion.
I: Inform. The person you need to keep updated.
Benefits of the RACI model
- Provides clarity to roles and eliminate confusion
The RACI model assumes every stakeholder is on the “least involvement basis”. It means every stakeholder should be involved in the project as least as possible. If the person only needs to know about the project progress, we won’t need to involve him in decision making. If the person only needs to share his opinion, we won’t have to put him in the project team to execute the project together. The framework allows you to identify the role of stakeholders and define their scope of influence.
- Prioritizes communication between stakeholders
The model ensures you find who is the most important stakeholder at the time, therefore you can spend most of the time communicating with them. The feedback of the most important stakeholder should weigh the most. Not so much for the rest of the stakeholders.
All stakeholders are equal, but some are more equal than the others.
Applying RACI into your project
You will need to break down your project in various parts, then identify all potential stakeholders in the project. The more inclusive the better. The RACI breakdown should look like this:
For better clarity, every stakeholder should have only one role. But there might be chances when a stakeholder might have more than one. You’ll need to judge this on a case-by-case basis.
Let’s apply this model in a real-life scenario. You, the product manager, are about to launch a new revamped CRM. Here are all your stakeholders:
- The marketing department is the main user of the platform.
- The customer success team occasionally needs to use the CRM platform to send out urgent messages to users.
- The analytics team is responsible to build dashboards from the CRM data.
- The engineering team is responsible for the development of the platform.
How should we breakdown the project? This is my thought.
Extra Tip: Consider the company structure.
If you are working in larger organizations you will need to consider the company structure. Ignoring the company structure might harm your reputation in the company. I suggest keeping the team manager informed when his/her team member is involved. Executives, even being interested in the project, might not have a lot of time to contribute to the project. I’ll usually ask the executives to nominate one of his/her teammates to be involved in the project.
Stakeholder management is hard. But with the RACI model, we can find clarity by identifying the role of stakeholders and prioritize communication accordingly. It means you are happier, and your stakeholders are happier.
