Let’s practice #RACI always

When communicating actively with our project stakeholders, we like to use the #RACI model, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

The #RACI project management model is a powerful tool to ensure not everyone is copied on everything. Role clarity ensures the right people are in the right conversations – so we don’t have either overflow or blockage.

With #RACI, R is for task-level work, which means whoever is accountable (A in RACI) loads up SMART tasks into Basecamp, organized into to-do lists.
Dennis is usually C, but if not, then I – so he’s one of the two. Anyone who is R, A, or C is by definition I generally in the project, but not necessarily I for every single thread.

Managing Basecamp Subscribers

1.Before posting your comment/message in a particular thread, always check how many are currently subscribed, who are those subscribers and whether they are part of #RACI or not. In each project, we have the Project’s #RACI doc and Overview thread where we can find info on #RACI. If you can’t find them, send an email to operations@yourcontentfactory.com.

2. After checking, you can then remove anyone who isn’t involved in the project.

3. Besides clients, team members within RACI, and anyone who will contribute to a project, please add the Operations Manager and the Project Management Specialist to the people who have access to any project you will make in the future. They are both Basecamp admins so they need to have access to all the projects though they don’t need to be subscribed to all the Message Board threads of all the projects. Basecamp admins don’t have automatic access to newly created projects.

4. By default, all new Content Factory team members are subscribed to all the Message Board threads of a project once they are added to a particular project. Our solution here is for non-#RACI people to “Stop Following” the project. That is, they have access to the project – only that they are not subscribed to all the Message Board threads.

The Tricky Part

As part of our daily operations and updating all the projects (client & internal) in Basecamp, every time we see a thread having more than 6 subscribers, it is almost always certain that we need to trim down and remove the non-#RACI subscribers of that thread.

Here’s the tricky part:

Not all who have posted a message(s)/comment(s) are part of #RACI. But at some point, they need to post something because they’re tagged in that thread because someone has asked for their help OR someone has asked them some info OR someone needs to inform them of something. And usually, those team members who are not really part of #RACI – they forget to unsubscribe themselves after they’ve replied. So if we always bear in mind #RACI, we can easily notice people who don’t have specific involvement and unsubscribe them from any threads.

Practice #RACI to trim the number of people on any threads to just those people specifically involved so we don’t needlessly clog up the email inboxes of people who aren’t directly involved.