Depicting Roles with a Responsibility Assignment Matrix

One way you can display team roles and responsibilities is in a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) — also called a Linear Responsibility Chart (LRC). Defining and sharing team roles and responsibilities upfront can help you improve performance and identify and head off potential difficulties during any project you are managing.

The RAM is a table that depicts each project audience’s role in the performance of different project activities. A RAM’s format is as follows:

• Project deliverables are in the left-hand column.

• Project audiences are in the top row.

• The role each audience will play in performing the work to produce each deliverable is in the intersections of the rows and columns.

  

  Use a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) to display project roles.

The RAM here indicates which of the following three roles people can have in this project’s activities:

• Primary responsibility (P): You’ll ensure the results are achieved.

• Secondary responsibility (S): You’ll ensure some portion of the results is achieved.

• Approval (A): You’re not actually working on the deliverable, but you approve the results produced by others who are.

The RAM is just a format; for each project, you define and assign the roles you feel are appropriate. You may, for example, decide to use the following roles in addition to the three already defined:

• Review (R): You review and comment on the results of an activity, but your formal approval isn’t required.

• Output (O): You receive products from the activity.

• Input (I): You provide input for the activity work.

The RAM chart suggests that three people work together on this activity as follows:

• Staffer A has primary responsibility for the questionnaire’s content, format, and layout. On this project, Staffer A reports to the task leader who, in turn, reports to the project manager.

• The task leader performs selected parts of the questionnaire design under the general coordination of Staffer A. Also, the task leader must approve all aspects of the questionnaire design before work can proceed to the next step.

• The project manager must approve the entire questionnaire, even though he isn’t doing any of the actual design or layout himself.

You can analyze any RAM vertically by audience and horizontally by activity for situations that may give rise to problems.