Managing your charity website project with RACI charting and analysis

When planning your charity website development project, we recommend clients identify and factor in any possible risks and challenges that could impact progress in the project planning stage. By doing so, everyone collaborating on your project will know what to look out for and can rectify the issues more efficiently as and when they crop up. As they say, if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

There are lots of tried and tested techniques that will help you to plan for and avoid common risks when managing your charity website redevelopment. In this series of articles, we will be sharing our top tips and planning tools to help you get started:

• RACI Charting and Analysis
• Using a RAID log for charity website projects
• Building a Lesson’s log

This article is the first in a three-part series that looks at these three planning tools and how they can help you best manage your website development project. We’ll first focus on RACI charting and analysis.

RACI Charting and Analysis

RACI is an acronym for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. Often referred to as a RACI matrix, in its most simplified form it is a document that identifies the people responsible for each deliverable, stage or milestone of the project. Creating a RACI matrix will help to clarify roles, expectations and exactly who has the decision-making authority for each aspect of the project.

The RACI categories can be defined as:

Responsible: the person/s who perform tasks or carry out the project work in order to supply the deliverable. Each stage of the project should have at least one responsible person but may have several. In terms of charity website development, your ‘responsibles’ are typically your developers, content creators and website administrators.

Accountable: the person who is accountable and has the decision-making authority. They will delegate and review work carried out for your charity website development project.  They should ensure the ‘responsibles’ understand their roles and expectations in the project and will keep a check on deadlines. Each task should ideally have just one accountable person, in order to prevent split decisions and delays. In a charity development project, your ‘accountables’ are likely to be those in leadership positions, the project sponsor and the project manager.

Consulted: the person/s who feedback and contribute to the project. As stakeholders, the project will affect their future work, so they will need to provide input as and when necessary. Consider which teams in your organisation might be affected by each task in your project and appoint one ‘consulted’ person per team or stakeholder group to avoid streamline communication and avoid delays as a result of duplicated feedback. For your charity website design project, your ‘consulted’ persons will typically be colleagues who head up various teams and departments within your organisation, together with other relevant stakeholders such as your Board of Trustees, target audience and existing beneficiaries.

Informed: the person/s who need to know of decisions or actions within your project. These are usually the high-level people connected to the project who will be kept in the loop on any significant developments or issues. Likely to be very busy with their existing roles, they shouldn’t be burdened with the minor details of each task or stage of your project but instead receive high level updates. The outcome of your project may affect them, but they aren’t the everyday decision makers in developing your charity website. They could include senior members of staff at your organisation, the chair of your board of trustees or other high-level stakeholders involved with your charity.

Using the RACI matrix

Your charity’s website redevelopment project is likely to require multiple teams to collaborate and work concurrently on the development, design, implementation and content. You won’t want to risk anyone making an important decision without the necessary approval, but you’ll also want to avoid having too many chefs in the kitchen, so to speak. A RACI matrix will ensure the right people are consulted at the right time and allow everybody involved to take ownership for their individual tasks.

To learn more about RACI charting and how to carry out your analysis to get the most from your efforts, read ‘How to Do RACI Charting and Analysis: A Practical Guide.

Speak to our charity website development team

Nothing beats having a team of professionals on your side to see your project through to a successful completion. Our project team are PRINCE2 Agile qualified, and we work to the highest standards in project management. Speak to us today to find out how we ensure our charity website development projects are delivered on time and to budget.