Project Lead Onboarding — What the Accountable Owner Actually Owns

Use this guide when work keeps returning to the founder. Responsible people do tasks. One Accountable owner owns the business result, the weekly decision, and the verified closure. Consulted people advise. Informed people receive the receipt. At Local Service Spotlight, Dennis is usually C or I—not the project operator. For contractor accounts, use the A-player project-lead companion to connect RACI to booked work, profit, team routing, and weekly MAA.

A is an operating contract, not a title

The Accountable owner may delegate every task, but cannot delegate the outcome. A missed reply, broken login, absent teammate, or blocked data source becomes a managed dependency—not a reason the project has no owner. The A either resolves it or escalates it early with one owner, one due date, and the exact source needed for closure.

The weekly proof

An A does not prove ownership by saying “I own it.” The proof is a short, source-backed Metrics → Analysis → Action loop:

• Metrics: customer value and business economics first; traffic and activity second. Missing data remains UNKNOWN.
• Analysis: name the narrowest constraint, the cause, and a counterbalancing metric.
• Action: no more than three next steps, each with an owner, due date, acceptance test, and verification source.
• Closure: begin the next report by checking what the prior action actually changed.

Financial authority remains explicit. Being A does not silently grant permission to spend, publish, change compensation, or make a client commitment. It does require the owner to surface the decision before it becomes an emergency and to keep the approved work moving afterward. See Level 4: Team Lead for the human leadership standard and Where the Retainer Goes for the economics behind a sustainable role.

PROJECT LEAD OUTCOME CONTRACT
Project and 30-day review period:
One Accountable owner:
Business or customer outcome:
Starting baseline and 30-day target:
Responsible task owners:
Consulted and Informed people:
Source systems and access available:
Routine decisions the lead may make:
Approval required before: spend / publishing / pricing / compensation /
  security or access changes / new client commitments / other
Weekly MAA deadline and source-thread URL:
What a passing handoff must contain:

PROJECT LEAD VERIFICATION
Project lead and review period:
Score: __ / 12
Status: PASS / PARTIAL / NOT YET
Evidence-pack URL:
Five receipts sampled: __ / 5 verified
Four consecutive on-time MAAs: YES / NO
Strongest demonstrated behavior:
Narrowest repair required:
Repair owner and next verification date:
Manager and verification date:

Why this agent exists

We published Let’s practice #RACI always in September 2020. One line in it has held up for six years:

Dennis is usually C, but if not, then I — so he’s one of the two.

That is the whole rule. R and A belong to the person watching the project day to day. Dennis sits in C or I. The reason is not modesty — it is throughput. The moment the founder is Responsible for a task, the task inherits the founder’s calendar, and the project moves at the speed of the busiest person on it.

The failure mode is well documented on this site. Teams either reply-all to everyone and flood the inboxes, or they message only Dennis and create a bottleneck. RACI fixes both — but only if somebody actually applies it when the project is created, which is exactly the moment everyone is in a hurry.

So we made it an agent. It runs at project setup, at task assignment, and as a repair pass on projects that already drifted.

What it enforces

1. The default RACI block

Every project overview, kickoff doc, or plan carries this block. Dennis appears in Consulted, Informed, or both — never in the top two rows.

RACI
Owner, day to day (Responsible): [young adult]
Project Manager: [ops person, if the project has one]
Accountable: [young adult]
Consulted: Dennis Yu, [subject-matter reviewer]
Informed: Dennis Yu, [client]

2. Zero to-dos assigned to Dennis

Every to-do gets the owner or another team member as assignee. When a to-do exists only because Dennis has to weigh in, the to-do still stays on the owner — the title gets rewritten so the owner’s job is to get the answer and then act.

The notify-on-completion field — Basecamp calls it When done — is how Dennis stays Informed without becoming the operator. He gets the completion notification. He does not get the task.

3. Client commitments survive the handoff

If Dennis already promised a client he would be on the weekly call, he stays on the call. The agent moves the scheduling, agenda, and follow-up to the owner instead. Reassigning work is an internal change; it never silently rewrites something a client was told.

A real run: the Markit Ads project

On August 2, 2026 we stood up a Special Project in Basecamp for Justin Sonnenreich of Markit Ads. It was created by Dennis’s agent rather than through the usual ops path, and it came out of the box with Dennis as Project Lead and Accountable, and four to-dos assigned to him. Exactly the drift this agent exists to prevent.

The repair pass, run the same day:

One to-do was written in the second person at Dennis — “Tell Justin the format and depth you want for the Friday weekly report.” It became “Get Dennis’s call on Friday report format and depth, then tell Justin,” assigned to Leo, with Dennis on notify-when-done. Same decision rights. Different hands.

How to run it

1. Copy everything between the START and END markers below into a file named 060-project-ownership-raci.skill.md.
2. Add it to your Claude project as project knowledge, or save it as an account skill.
3. Replace the bench names with your own team. The rule is structural; the roster is yours.
4. It triggers on project setup, task assignment, RACI blocks, and any request that would otherwise put the founder on a task.

The full skill file

START

---
name: project-ownership-raci
description: Dennis is never the owner or day-to-day operator on a project - a young adult on the team owns it and Dennis sits in Consulted/Informed. Apply this whenever creating, staffing, or fixing a project or task in Basecamp, ClickUp, Asana, Google Docs, a project plan, a RACI block, or a to-do list; whenever assigning work; and whenever a task would otherwise land on Dennis. Triggers on "set up a project", "create a project", "assign this", "who owns this", "RACI", "project lead", "make a to-do list", "stand up a client project", "kickoff".
---

# Project ownership and RACI

Canonical article: https://blitzmetrics.com/project-ownership-raci/
Origin doctrine: https://blitzmetrics.com/lets-practice-raci-always/

## The rule

Dennis Yu is almost never the owner, the assignee, or the person doing the task.

Every project gets a young adult on the team as its owner - the person who watches
over it day to day. Dennis is Consulted and/or Informed. That is the whole point:
it keeps Dennis out of operator and project-manager work.

This holds even when:
- Dennis created the project or the thread.
- The task is a decision only Dennis can make.
- The client asked Dennis directly.
- The work is small and Dennis could do it in two minutes.

## The default RACI block

    RACI
    Owner, day to day (Responsible): [young adult]
    Project Manager: [ops person, if the project has one]
    Accountable: [young adult]
    Consulted: Dennis Yu, [subject-matter reviewer]
    Informed: Dennis Yu, [client]

Dennis appears in Consulted, Informed, or both - never in Responsible or Accountable.

## Assigning tasks

- Every to-do gets the owner (or another team member) as assignee. Zero to-dos
  assigned to Dennis.
- Where a to-do exists only because Dennis has to weigh in, keep the to-do on the
  owner and rewrite the title so the owner's job is to get Dennis's answer and then
  act. Not "Tell the client the report format you want" but "Get Dennis's call on
  the report format, then tell the client."
- Use the notify-on-completion field (Basecamp "When done", equivalents elsewhere)
  to put Dennis in Informed without making him the operator.
- Never rewrite a client-facing commitment Dennis already made. If Dennis promised
  to be on a weekly call, he stays on the call. Move the scheduling, agenda, and
  follow-up to the owner instead.

## Picking the owner

Choose from the current active roster. A named project manager may coordinate the work
without being the Accountable owner. Verify the person's role, capacity, and decision
boundaries instead of copying names from an older example.

If it is not obvious who should own a new project, ask Dennis once, up front, with
named options. Do not default to Dennis and do not leave it blank. Ask once and
then commit - do not re-litigate the choice later in the same session.

## Retrofitting an existing project

When you find a project where Dennis is the owner, fix all of it, not just the
headline:

1. Reassign every Dennis-assigned to-do to the owner.
2. Add Dennis to the notify-when-done field on those to-dos.
3. Rewrite any to-do title written in the second person at Dennis ("the format
   YOU want") into the owner's voice.
4. Update the RACI block: owner and accountable to the young adult; Dennis to
   Consulted and Informed.
5. Update any cadence line that makes Dennis the operator ("Friday review between
   Dennis and the client") so the owner runs the logistics.
6. Report what changed. Do not announce the roster change to the client unless
   Dennis asks.

## Editing rich-text fields safely (Basecamp Trix and similar)

- Never press Escape inside an open Basecamp to-do edit form. It clears the due
  date and notes without warning.
- Never use Home then Shift+End to select a line. Shift+End selects to the end of
  the DOCUMENT, not the line; typing then deletes everything below.
- Triple-click on a list item selects the trailing paragraph break too, so typing
  merges the next block into it. Safe on a list item followed by another list item
  (press Return after typing to re-split). Not safe on the last item of a list.
- The safest edit is a pure insertion: click a precise point, type, and add or
  remove characters with Backspace. Verify by zooming on the line.
- Screenshot after every field change. Verify before pressing Save. If a form looks
  wrong, click "Never mind" and start over rather than saving.
- The "Edit" control often needs a second click - the first frequently does not
  open the form. Screenshot to confirm edit mode before typing.

## Publishing rule

Every skill we ship has a webpage. When this skill is created or materially
changed, the canonical article above is created or updated in the same pass, and
the entry is added to the Agent Roster at https://blitzmetrics.com/agents/.

END

Related reading

• Let’s practice #RACI always — the original doctrine, including how to trim Basecamp subscribers to just the RACI people.
• How to Set Up a Basecamp Project for a New Client — the setup this agent audits against.
• Creating and Managing Tasks in Basecamp — SMART tasks, which is what the R in RACI loads up.
• Don’t Tag Me in Basecamp — Here’s Why — the notification side of the same discipline.
• How To Be an Effective Project Manager For Your Clients
• Level 4: Team Lead — the level at which a young adult is ready to own a project.