Beyond RACI Charts: Applying RACI to complex projects using Airtable

In this post, I outline how you can use Airtable to manage projects with multiple stakeholders and their responsibilities by building modified RACI chart using a database as your table

RACI is an acronym that stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed. It's a simple way to assign tasks in projects.

The RACI matrix specifies which people are responsible for which activities (who does what). It also tells you who is accountable for the each activity's success or failure (who's ultimately responsible if things go wrong). It establishes whether you're expected to consult with other individuals before acting on your own plan of action or not—and whether they should be kept informed about developments in the project as they occur.

However, since RACI charts are not designed for large teams, it can be difficult to maintain when the number of roles grows too large. If you have 100 people on your team, you end up with a table 100 columns wide and 1000 columns deep.

While RACI charts lack the complexity of other project management tools, their simple format and concise languange make them easy to understand and update. We can increase the complexity of our responsibility chart while preserving its core values by redefining some RACI elements.

I set up my RACI chart using the same table that I used to build my team's workflow diagram. ( Read More:

In other words, I use one table for both documents. This is useful because it gives us the opportunity to review who's responsibility it is to initiate a transition in the workflow; this information can’t reasonably be reflected in a workflow diagram, but when we see it on our RACI chart we can ensure that every person and task are accounted for correctly. It also means the workflow diagram and documentation surrounding it (my RACI chart) always agree on the process. It becomes a reference point for auditing our current procedures and identify areas where there are still opportunity to reduce bottlenecks and improve our process.

For each record, I have 4 linked fields (Responsible/Accountable/Consulted/Informed) which correspond directly with four columns in my "People" table. By linking these fields together, you can select one or more people for each category of accountability—and if you go into your "People" table and view its records individually, you'll see a concise list of where they fit into that structure.

I want the updated version of this chart to be especially easy to view and edit. I created a Glide page that get's it's data from my airtable base, as well as each record in my "people" table has a page that lists all of the activities linked to that person. This is useful for building consensus about each person's role in the development process, as well as assisting future team members in understanding the team's existing roles and processes.

In this blog post, I’ve talked about how you can use Airtable to keep track of complex projects with multiple stakeholders and their corresponding responsibilities. RACI charts are an excellent tool for organizing teams with different roles, but they can be difficult to scale. With Airtable, you can create a single database that allows you to easily organize your activities based on shared characteristics like category or accountable party. It’s also easy to share this information with other team members and stakeholders so they can stay up-to-date on the status of your project. By keeping track of your RACI chart in Airtable, you can ensure that everyone on your team has access to up-to-date information about their specific responsibilities—and no one is left out of the loop.