How do you evaluate and improve your project team roles and responsibilities matrix over time?

Working in the Design & Development of multidisciplinary products, I've found the RACI matrix to be invaluable in improving role clarity, accountability, and communication across various teams. It clearly outlines the scope, key activities, and deliverables for both teams and individuals. Those accountable are empowered to make decisions within their defined scope to achieve targets. By effectively implementing the RACI matrix, multidisciplinary teams collaborate more cohesively, with each member fully aware of their role in the project's success.

When you work in a consulting company, you usually created the initial RACI matrix before the project started, in the proposal phase. And I like to use our knowledge base with a lot of lessons learned to create this initial RACI. When we start the creation of the project charter, it is time to review and update the RACI….and the same when we have a new phase or stage gate.

Due to the nature of my work, I have found it useful to the RACI matrix at the beginning of every project phase. However there are instances that updates are to be made as the project progresses, especially for Agile or Hybrid projects.

In my experience, the creation of the RACI Matrix is most beneficial in the beginning of the project phase, or when a new resource is added into the team. Projects will typically struggle in lack of resources or too many resources on a project, which leads to blurred lines of responsibility, and causing an individual to wear multiple hats. In addition, stakeholders and individuals on the team itself will find this document very helpful as this allows them to know who is involved on the project in the event of questions, comments, or concerns. I would recommend every two months for review due to the nature of constant change in projects.

In a tech or software implementation project, in every phase we have different activities, tasks, deliverables and milestone. Because of these, in a must that in the beginning of each phase we make a detailed analysis and an update of the RACI matrix to reflect the phase needs. These changes must be updated in the project plans and communicated to the project team and main stakeholder’s.

Ensuring that the team is operating smoothly from a task-completion and healthy relations is a must for any high-performance team. I find it common in the workforce that contributors within the team will accidentally spoil relations to team members by overstepping in their role. The RACI Matrix should be seen as a source of agreement of roles and responsibilities from the team when the matrix is completed, and used to politely re-present that agreement when that type of conflict arises. Publish the document in a location that is accessible and higher chance of being viewed such as central document repository, regularly scheduled meetings, or a teams channel.

If you don’t communicate the RACI matrix properly, the project team could be lost. There are a lot of process and activities to be done in a project and everyone should know who is the responsible to create something, to review and to approve it. And who need should be involved or even informed about. The RACI matrix is a key input to the communication plan.

No doubt that the RACI matrix could be used is as an accelerator for future projects. But it requires a step during the project closing phase, to collect the lessons learned, classify the matrix according project type / phase. Some feedbacks are also important, difference points off view could help to understand what works and what not works in some perspectives. Also important to document the way the matrix was communicated to project team and may stakeholder’s.

RACI matrix is something reusable. In the project closing, it is a best practice to review all the changes that happened in the RACI matrix during the project and incorporate it, as lessons learned, in a knowledge base. It will work as an accelerator in your next projects.

Evaluate and enhance project team roles and responsibilities in renewable energy projects, including subsea and wind elements. Regularly review and refine the matrix, emphasizing roles in feasibility studies and application support for seamless integration. Use feedback loops, performance metrics, and lessons learned to adapt and optimize team dynamics over time.