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July 28, 2025
It's Wednesday, it's 10:37.
Your phone is ringing.
It is the producer who informs you that quality assurance has blocked a production.
Immediately, engineering, maintenance, quality, quality, continuous improvement and the new building project team must be convened for a crisis meeting.
But who is the prod?
Who should you invite for engineering, maintenance and quality?
And the project team, do they all come together?
Don't we know all these people?
It's a bit confusing...
You are facing something common in businesses:
It's chaos.
Define generic roles in RACIs remains something very comfortable for the authors of proceedings.
They can give themselves and others the impression that they are working.
They are proud to have had a new procedure approved.
But in the end, it's still an absolute mess.
And behind the unconscious comfort of maintaining the blur, there is in fact a lack of courage that is just as unconscious.
Clarify The roles of a RACI to have unambiguous responsibilities requires managerial courage.
We have to go face to face power wars.
It is also necessary to confront the perimeters of responsibility, the allocation of hierarchical lines, direct and indirect.
In short... it takes courage.
In my example at the beginning:
- replace prod with line supervisor.
- replace quality with the quality technician in the area.
- replace maintenance with tech maintenance of the area.
- replace the new building project team with the new building equipment manager...
So you will know perfectly well who you should hold your crisis meeting with.
The challenges of a clear definition of roles are colossal:
- in terms of reactivity,
- in terms of the correctness of the decisions to be taken,
- in terms of process performance, quite simply.
Now let's look at 3 tips to clarify the roles you put in your RACI matrix.
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Who is the “quality team”?
Who is the “maintenance team”?
We don't know then who “Area Quality Technician”, or “Equipment Maintenance Technician”, I know exactly who it is!
I can put a name and a phone on it!
So try to put roles that represent positions of the organization, it will be easier.
I saw RACI with “Head of Quality” and “Head of Manufacturing” in the same column...
We call it an armchair for two.
It is not clear.
Who decides?
Who does the task?
Who is accountable?
One shot one, one shot the other?
In the lottery, in Russian roulette, in the choice according to the direction of the wind?
Have the courage to clarify that, and put only one role per column.
In the RACI matrices, one of the biggest flaws is to put a role dedicated to each task.
Basically, the writer writes, the reviewer reviews, the approver approves...
Fine, but what do we do with it.
If you do that, you will be forced to have an organizational correspondence matrix and therefore one more document.
If I take an example from us, in our RACI on the sales process and the creation of digital training, we have a role that is a content creator.
But we certainly did not separate this role of content creator according to the types of content.
We manage this role with a list of expected skills.
Additionally, there is one skill per content type.
We can then manage a pool of content creators, develop multi-skills, and introduce new content modalities without modifying the RACI.
Finally, I would like to share with this link about committees: 3 GOOD REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD KICK COMMITTEES OUT OF YOUR RACI.
You can share this article with your documentation and training teams.
Check with them that the roles in your RACIs are clear and unambiguous.
On our website you can also access a portion of our DOC&training simplification training.
So see you on the other side!
See you soon!