Organisation and RACI

The organisation is everyone involved in the project: your own teams, the client, contractors, suppliers and regulators. RACI records what each of them does on each activity. Between them, they decide who carries the work, where products sit on the Roadmap, and how effort adds up.

Parties: groups and roles

Plan Swiftly calls everyone in the organisation a party. Parties form a tree. A top-level party is usually an organisation or a group, such as "Principal" or "Systems Integrator", and the parties beneath it are its teams and roles, such as "Project Manager" or "Design Engineer". You can nest them as deeply as your organisation needs.

Build the tree on the Organisation tab. In edit mode:

• Party adds a top-level party (in an empty project, choose Add Party).
• Child Party adds a party beneath the one you've selected.
• Governance Body adds a decision-making body, such as a project board (see below).

Select a party to open its details:

• Person name: who fills the role, if you know.
• Linked project member: links the role to someone on the project team. Their name then replaces the person name everywhere.
• Description and Stakeholder concerns: what the party does, and what matters to them about the project.
• External: marks a party outside your own organisation, such as a client, supplier or regulator. Parties beneath an external party are external too, unless you set them otherwise. External parties are shown with a dashed outline in exports.
• Show in Responsibilities/Effort: whether the party has its own column on the Responsibilities tab (see below).

Governance bodies

A governance body is a group that makes decisions, such as a project board or a design authority. Its members are drawn from your parties, and it can be the approval authority for gates. See Governance bodies.

RACI

Each role on an activity has one of these responsibilities:

Assign roles in an activity's details in edit mode, choosing each role's responsibility and its hours. You can also set responsibilities on the Responsibilities tab: in edit mode, click a cell to choose a responsibility or remove it.

Processes have RACI roles too, showing who governs each process. See them on the Responsibilities tab with Process.

Give every activity one Accountable role (A or R/A) and at least one Responsible role (R or R/A). If an activity has more than one Accountable role, only the first is used to place its products on the Roadmap.

How RACI is used

The Roadmap

The Roadmap's lanes are parties, and its columns are phases. By default each top-level party has a lane. Each product is placed in the lane of the Accountable party of the activity that produces it, in that activity's phase. If several activities produce the same product, the one in the latest phase decides.

In edit mode, Swimlanes chooses which parties have their own lane. A party without a lane is shown in the lane of the nearest party above it that has one, and the lane shows "+n hidden" for the parties it includes. If a product's Accountable party has no lane anywhere above it, the product is listed under Issues with Show … lane.

A product can't be placed if the activity producing it has no phase or no Accountable role. The activity shows a warning in its details and on the WBS tab.

Responsibilities and Effort

The Responsibilities tab has a column for each party with Show in Responsibilities/Effort turned on. A hidden party's responsibilities are shown in the column of the nearest visible party above it, so nothing is lost. Top-level parties are always shown.

The Effort tab shows every party as a row in your organisation tree, with each row including the hours of the parties beneath it. Parties with Show in Responsibilities/Effort turned on start expanded. Hours come from the roles on each activity, whatever their responsibility (see Estimating).

The Staff Guide and exports

The Staff Guide brings together one role's activities, responsibilities, hours and governance duties. Its Role Pack turns that into a PDF briefing (see Offline copies). The Poster and the Estimation Report use the Accountable role to show who leads each phase: the role Accountable for most of its activities.

Health Check

These checks look at the organisation and RACI (see Health Check):

• All activities have Accountable role and All activities have Responsible role
• All processes have Accountable role
• Producing activities have a phase and Accountable role
• Products placeable on Roadmap
• No empty groups: a top-level party with no parties beneath it
• RACI matrix adequately populated: flags a matrix where fewer than 10% of the cells are filled