Welcome To The Canoe Group's Adaptive Strategy Blog
The Canoe Group provides dynamic solutions that optimize organizations for today's business realities. Take time to explore our blog where we offer actionable advice and lessons learned from our over 30 years of business and consulting experience.
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To your success,
Dave, Marta and Michael
By Michael Kosmala on August 24, 2009
Project Management: 6 Steps To Creating A Successful RASCI Chart
Non Profit Communications, Non Profit Management, Strategic Planning
The August, 2009 edition of our newsletter The J-Stroke introduced the RASCI tool as a means of discussing and clarifying roles/responsibilities in any organizational project or initiative.
If you don’t know RASCI and haven’t read the J-Stroke, you’ll want to read the following excerpt to get caught up. Otherwise, skip to my tips on creating a sucessful RASCI chart starting today.
At The Canoe Group, we use the RASCI model as the cornerstone for devising clear lines of responsibility from the early stages of pre-planning through the implementation of the project/initiative. It mitigates project risk and models good management behavior that carries forward (beneficially) from our consulting activities.
Benefits of using RACSI
- Determines ownership of a particular project or task
- Promotes teamwork by clarifying roles and responsibilities
- Improves communication by getting the right groups involved
- Increases efficiency by eliminating duplication of effort
- Reduces misunderstanding between and across employees and key stakeholder groups
- Improves decision-making by ensuring the correct people are involved
- Provides the foundation for future alignment around a given project or initiative
Understanding the RASCI acronym
For every step of your planning project, you should define the following:
R = Responsible The person who is ultimately responsible for delivering the project and/or task successfully.
A = Accountable The person who has ultimate accountability and authority; they are the person to whom “R” is accountable.
S = Supportive The person or team of individuals who are needed to do “the real work.”
C = Consulted Someone whose input adds value and/or buy-in is essential for ultimate implementation.
I = Informed The person or groups of individuals who need to be notified of results or actions taken but don’t need to be involved in the decision-making process.
Reasons why you should consider using RASCI
Still not sure if this will help you? The following are some common symptoms we see in our work that points to a need for RASCI.
- You have “too many cooks in the kitchen” – multiple individuals think they are responsible for the same project and/or task resulting in duplication of effort and decreased morale.
- You have taken action within your organization only to find out later that you have damaged a relationship with a key employee/stakeholder group because they weren’t involved in the process earlier.
- You have poor communication or infighting that occurs between departments around day-to-day business operations.
- A critical task in the implementation of an earlier initiative does not happen and you find out that nobody believes they had responsibility for the task.
- Some individuals within your organization feel that they should be consulted during a decision-making process when you think they should be informed.
Here we share one method for clarifying roles and responsibilities using the RASCI model. While a project manager could individually accomplish this, we encourage our clients to include other key members of the project team in defining the RASCI. It simply improves the results of any planning process.
6 Steps To Creating A Successful RASCI Chart
- Introduce/review RASCI definitions with your team. Note: see the above section titled Understanding the RASCI acronym.
- Identify and list all of the activities/tasks involved in the project down the vertical axis of a chart or spreadsheet.
- Identify all of the people/roles involved in the project and list them across the horizontal axis or spreadsheet.
- Identify the R, A, S, C, and I for each activity/task on your vertical axis.
- Review and discuss gaps or overlaps in your work. Note: Gaps exist when you have an activity/task that doesn’t have a ‘R.’ Overlaps can occur when you have multiple ‘R’s for any given task and can be more difficult to resolve. Frequently, this can be accomplished by breaking the identified task into sub-tasks.
- Share your RASCI chart with a broader group for feedback (if beneficial), make final revisions and get started on your project!
Sample RASCI Chart
Do you have a different planning tool you use to clarify roles/responsibilities? Or a question about RASCI?
Drop me a comment below and I’ll be happy to respond.
By Marta Mellinger on July 7, 2009
Shared Leadership Meets The Cannon Beach Sandcastle Contest
In mid-June, The Canoe Group and friends spent a weekend on the Oregon Coast. We entered a team in the annual Cannon Beach Sandcastle Contest. We loved being with our friends and we built this totally cool and totally transitory thing. We learned a lot together.
The shared leadership of the sandcastle building was a fascinating thing. We had a scale model of Crater Lake, built out of white modeling clay from images captured from Google Earth (see the world from any place and angle). And we had photos and drawings and a gridded site map. The high level vision was set but none of the details… and definitely no job descriptions.
Clay model of Sandcastle
We were a team of four women and four men. Our team’s natural leadership style was “I’m just going to go ahead and do what I think needs to be done next.” Because we knew collaborating was key, our approach meant we were all not only working, but also continually scoping and commenting on each other’s efforts and choices. “I like that” got said a lot. Also, “do you need help?” Because we were working side-by-side in a 21 x 21 foot square plot this approach pretty much flowed.
By David on May 26, 2009
Many Spaces: Practicing the Art of Collaboration
Community Engagement, Information Technology, Initiative R&D, Strategic Communications
Last week, The Canoe Group produced the Oregon Arts Summit 2009 for the Oregon Arts Commission, titled “The Art of Collaboration.” A standing-room-only crowd of over 300 participants converged on the Tiger Woods Center of the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton. The Summit design was grounded in concepts from Parker Palmer, an educator best known for his book The Courage to Teach.
The Arts Summit invited attendees to join together to “co-learn” with selected domain experts in plenary session in what we called the BallRoom (distinguished by large yoga balls adorning the stage). Each speaker (all invited from different industries) addressed his/her key learning for an initial 15 minutes in plenary session, and was then joined by an onstage collaborator for a short, unrehearsed Q & A session.
On a strict schedule, the pair retired to another space, The Studio, to continue their dialogue with those who chose to follow from the plenary session. Meanwhile, the next speaker began the same process again in the BallRoom.
During the move-breaks (15 minutes of networking between each primary speaker), the Summit offered 8-minute off-the-cuff briefings on topical and substantive issues in The Collaboratory. Some attendees chose these move-breaks as times to text-message or tweet, others decompressed with coffee and snacks. The six move-breaks, and the hour-long lunch break got everyone moving their bodies on a regular basis, an antidote to sitting in long sessions.
While we have written about the event in a recent J-Stroke article, the layout of the event had at its hub the Collaboratory: a place for people to gather and experience a variety of collaborative tasks including the following:
By David on May 21, 2009
Oregon Arts Summit 2009: Important Links
Last week, The Canoe Group produced the Oregon Arts Summit 2009 for the Oregon Arts Commission, themed “The Art of Collaboration”.
We anticipate expanding this list of links to the Oregon Arts Commission site and the content from the event in the next few weeks, so look for updates below.
For those who follow Pacific Northwest arts/business blogs, you will find a number of posts about the Summit learnings, led by Oregonian writer Barry Johnson, posting on OregonLive.com’s Portland Arts Watch.
- Barry Johnson’s First post on the day
- Barry Johnson’s Oregonian article online
- Barry Johnson’s Oregonian additional comments online
Addtional Bloggers who followed the event included the Culture Shock Arts Blog.
- From the Culture Shock Arts Blog liveblogging the event
- From the Culture Shock Arts Blog additional comments
Finally, Kim Stafford read the “Declaration of Creative Rights” at the Summit. A video is expected soon and will be included on this list when available. Here is the Oregonian article on the Declaration.
By David on March 18, 2009
Social Media: 4 Very Different Perspectives, Part 4
I did not expect this. Last year, my college age daughter found out that her boyfriend was leaving her because he changed his “relationship status” on Facebook. This is very bad behavior… but now within the range of normal (though still impolite) for Facebook. Likewise 5 years ago, I did not expect my 14-year-old daughter to insist on moving from MySpace to Facebook with the words, “MySpace is for little kids.”
I like to look at social networking as a broad-based social phenomenon. My test case involved parenting my daughters. First there was the constant instant messaging 8 years ago. Now they text using their phones exclusively. No email. No voicemail. I think it keeps it clean and “right now” for them. Social networking is, if anything, about flow, immediacy and relevance.
I joined Facebook about 2 years ago. Got my “cool Dave” photograph out. I look fit and young. I have gone to parties and events from invitations from friends distributed through Facebook. I’ve done the important culling of “friend” invitations through the oh-so-important ignore button. I’ve emailed people and asked, “how do I know you?” Facebook is the all purpose web application to find out what is going on with people who find Facebook valuable enough to spend a lot of time on it. I check in to Facebook about 4 times a week. I will increase that participation as it increases in relevance for me.
So what about other social networks? I’m an observer of, but not a contributor to, political blogs. I have my favorites that I check several times each day. It has become another newspaper experience. I don’t have any cause-based social network yet, as I’m busy enough collecting and interpreting the information feed I’m getting on selected topics.
Social media is a major new application of technology to our daily lives. Time to wake up and participate.
How To Stay Informed
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