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A RACI matrix is a document that clarifies which individuals or groups are responsible for a project’s successful completion, and the roles that each will play throughout the project. The acronym RACI stands for the different responsibility types: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

Successful project management depends on a team-wide understanding of roles and responsibilities. Using a RACI matrix to assign and define each role is a great way to keep a project on track and positioned for success. When designed correctly, the RACI matrix is a way for a project manager to help ensure the success of the project before it’s even begun.

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How Does a RACI Chart Help Project Managers?

Project managers use RACI charts to keep track of team roles and relay those responsibilities to the larger team. The matrix defines clear roles and responsibilities for individual team members across the various phases of the project, breaking each role down into four types of designation: those who are Responsible and Accountable for project deliverables, those who should be Consulted as work begins, and stakeholders who need to be Informed of ongoing progress, roadblocks, and updates. 

Read more about project phases

RACI Matrix Definitions 

Responsible.

The individual(s) with responsibility for the task or deliverable is typically responsible for developing and completing the project deliverables themselves. The responsible parties are typically hands-on team members that make direct contributions toward the completion of the project. The responsible team is comprised of the project’s “doers”, working hands-on to ensure that each deliverable is completed. 

Some examples of responsible parties are:

  • Project Managers
  • Business Analysts
  • Graphic Designers
  • Copywriters

Accountable

Accountable parties ensure accountability to project deadlines, and ultimately, accountability to project completion. This group frequently also falls under the informed category.

Some examples of accountable parties are:

  • Product Owners
  • Signature Authorities
  • Business Owners
  • Key Stakeholders

Consulted individuals’ opinions are crucial, and their feedback needs to be considered at every step of the game. These individuals provide guidance that is often a prerequisite to other project tasks, for example, providing legal guidance on a project throughout the process. If you are working on new product development or expansion, this could essentially be the entire organization.

Some examples of consulted parties are:

  • Legal Experts
  • Information Security and Cybersecurity Experts
  • Compliance Consultants

Informed persons are those that need to stay in the loop of communication throughout the project. These individuals do not have to be consulted or be a part of the decision-making, but they should be made aware of all project updates. Typically, this party are business owners or stakeholders that are more interested in viewing the project at a 30,000-foot view.  Keep this group on your cc list for awareness of topics, decisions, and progress – that includes making them part of the initial project kickoff and project demos as optional attendees. This group often also falls under the accountable group.

Some examples of informed parties are:

  • Project Committee Members
  • External Stakeholders

Why Are RACI Roles Important?

RACI roles provide a sense of organization and clarity for teams that are looking to divide roles and keep team members accountable for their contributions. Considering that 27% of projects go over budget, for reasons like scope creep and lack of defined roles, RACI roles help position a project for success and avoid common pitfalls. 

Moreover, RACI roles help ensure that communication between all roles is ongoing. When you consider that nearly half of all project spending is at risk of being wasted due to a lack of effective team-based communication , it becomes all that more important to prioritize. Ultimately, teams who prioritize communication and well-defined roles are better off, and RACI roles help teams achieve that goal faster – while providing accountability for each team member’s unique contributions to the success of the project. 

Read More: Top 10 Main Causes of Project Failure

How to Create a RACI Matrix 

If you’re looking to implement a RACI matrix as part of your team’s project planning process, take these steps to create a RACI matrix.

Ensure that you have a thorough understanding of the project and its demands before outlining any further steps by communicating with key stakeholders and decision-makers.

Determine the list of key activities and deliverables from the director of program management or other leadership. 

Determine who is needed to be a part of the project or initiative.

Determine the project roles and responsible job titles and persons for each activity and deliverable.

Hold review sessions with key members of the team for alignment, and if you haven’t already, host a kickoff meeting with the entirety of the team and key stakeholders to unveil the matrix, address questions, and more. 

If the project has already started, it’s not too late to implement a RACI matrix.

  • Outline the story. Using research from multiple sources, do a, b, c, and d.
  • Utilize steps 2 and 3 (shown above). Ensure the right groups are assigned and engaged. 
  • Hold a review session. Ensure that the team acknowledges and discusses the plan and the roles assigned.

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{{ title }}, examples of a raci matrix.

Colorful table RACI matrix with definitions of RACI roles.

Our FREE Downloadable RACI Matrix Template

Who creates the raci matrix.

The RACI matrix — sometimes called RACI model, RACI diagram, or simply just RAC — is created by the project manager at the start of the project as a key part of establishing the initial human resources planning for the project. Because miscommunication is a common threat to any project, RACI charts are a great asset to teams dealing with any type of project, from very simple projects to extremely complex ones. 

FAQ: How do I Implement a RACI matrix?

Implementing a RACI matrix takes more than just a few emails and sporadic conversations – it takes consistent communication and planning. You should host a kickoff meeting to introduce the matrix to the team and make a plan to continue meeting at predetermined times throughout the project lifecycle. 

Here are a few more tips to keep in mind as you implement your RACI matrix within the team dynamic:

  • Get everyone prepared. Send the document around to the meeting distribution as read-ahead material, requesting feedback if there are any major concerns. 
  • Roll out each role for the team . During the meeting, conduct a review of the tasks and responsible parties. Do not rush through this review, but rather ensure enough time in your project kickoff for this important aspect. (Be certain to clarify the definitions of RACI to avoid ambiguity.)
  • Consider changes and update accordingly. After the meeting, send out the notes documenting acceptance or updates to the RACI. In addition to sending out the notes, request any corrections within a reasonable yet defined timeframe. Clarify that if no changes are requested, each person is acknowledging their role and committing to the project tasks as outlined.
  • Stay in touch. Consider a quick review with the entire team each quarter or every six months for longer projects to ensure it remains up-to-date and not simply another document in the repository but a relied-upon artifact.

FAQ: What are RACI matrix best practices?

As you implement the raci matrix….

  • Encourage teamwork and foster collaboration whenever possible.
  • Don’t fear updates – make changes and adjustments as needed (but be sure to communicate those changes clearly to all parties).
  • Earlier is better. Roll out your matrix plan to the team BEFORE you plan to implement it for the best results. 
  • Have a clear-cut understanding of the project scope and how each role connects to the overall project goal.

For “Responsible” Parties:

  • Make sure your project’s definition of Responsible is clear on who holds the “decider” role for the project or project phase’s completion, and what the dimensions of that responsibility will be.
  • Ensure that all parties are aware of their role and responsibilities within the matrix.

For “Accountable” Parties: 

  • When multiple Accountable team members must exist, use your definitions to make clear which individual is accountable for a given project element, and how that individual needs to interact with other Accountable team members.
  • Ensure that there is only one “Accountable” party assigned per task.
  • Be sure that the Accountable party has the authority and power to oversee the task as the accountable party.

For Consulted and Informed Parties: 

  • Consulted parties are often high-level decision-makers with heavy schedules. Make sure you’re clear on their availability ahead of time.
  • Similar to Consulted parties, Informed parties are often less hands-on and have less understanding of day-to-day project operations. As the project goes on, make sure to keep detailed notes to keep the Informed party up-to-date on key information. 
  • Understand the ways that these parties like to communicate and create a plan to reach them early – whether that’s over phone calls, emails, video calls, or from within your project management system’s collaboration tools.
  • Knowing the difference between who needs to be consulted versus informed can be a challenge if there is ambiguity about project roles. Consider what aspects of the project different team members need to know to do their jobs, and then bake those into your definitions.

RACI Matrix Pros & Cons

Free raci matrix templates.

A number of project management software solutions include a native RACI matrix template. Here are just a few we’ve found:

Colorful RACI Chart Template

We love this template from Smartsheet because it’s colorful, thorough, and includes room for every party involved in the project. 

assignment of responsibility meaning

Pastel Colored RACI Matrix Template

This template from the Academy to Innovate HR is a great choice for project managers who want to organize their team roles with an easy-on-the-eyes chart that evolves beyond the simple spreadsheet. 

assignment of responsibility meaning

Simple RACI Chart from Clickup

These RACI templates from Clickup have enough variety to fit any of your project needs, but are simple enough for even beginner PMs to use.

assignment of responsibility meaning

Detailed RACI Matrix Template

This template is a great starter template for anyone looking to explore RACI charts in their project management strategy. As an added bonus – it comes with the RACI definitions already built in!

assignment of responsibility meaning

Excel-Based RACI Chart Template

Are you an Excel or Google Sheets user looking to take advantage of the RACI matrix? An Excel-formatted template from Project Management Docs can be just the solution for you. This template is a great template for users who want a chart that comes in a pre-formatted structure.

assignment of responsibility meaning

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assignment of responsibility meaning

Program Management

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) describes the participation of various organizations, people, and their roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project. The Program Manager (PM) uses it to clarify roles and responsibilities in a cross-functional team , projects, and processes. A RAM has four primary assignments: Responsible , Accountable , Consulted , and Informed (also called a RACI matrix).

Definition: A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) describes the role and responsibilities of various people and/or organizations in completing specific tasks for a project.

Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) Matrix

A RAM is called a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) matrix. The PMBOK Guide 4th Edition defines RACI as a RAM that illustrates the connections between work packages or activities and project team members. In fundamental terms, RAM refers to the framework in place to distribute duties to individuals where, in a RACI, each team member is assigned a role based on one of the four roles. On larger projects, RAMs can be developed at various levels.

  • Responsible (R): Those who do the work to achieve the task. There is typically one role with a participation type of responsibility, although others can be delegated to assist in the work required.
  • Accountable (A): The one ultimately accountable for the correct and thorough completion of the deliverable or task, and the one to whom Responsible is accountable. In other words, an Accountable must sign off (Approve) on work that Responsible provides. There must be only one Accountable specified for each task or deliverable.
  • Consulted (C): Those whose opinions are sought and with whom there is two-way communication.
  • Informed (I): Those who are kept up-to-date on progress, often only on completion of the task or deliverable, and with whom there is just one-way communication.

Benefit of Utilizing a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)

The RAM holds substantial advantages for project managers by clarifying the importance of their processes within the team. It fosters a sense of collective contribution among all employees, eliminating the sense of isolation. This project management technique, the RAM, empowers every team member to grasp the broader context of their work. Instead of simply instructing an administrative assistant to collect phone numbers without context, you can refer them to this valuable resource. By using the RAM, employees become more engaged in achieving positive results as they comprehend the alignment of their contributions with the company’s overall operations.

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Goal in Project Management

A RAM is used in project management as a communication tool to ensure that work tasks are designated as a responsible agent. A RAM can define what a project team is responsible for within each component of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) . It could also be used within a working group to designate roles, responsibilities, and levels of authority for specific activities. The matrix format shows all activities associated with one person and all people associated with one activity. This ensures that only one person is accountable for any task to avoid confusion.

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Tutorial

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Standard Format

A RAM is displayed as a chart that illustrates the interaction between work packages that need to be done and project team members. Typically, the list of objectives is on the left-hand column with the project team member names across the top. Each work package will be assigned to the appropriate project team member. The chart aids in communication among the project team members.

No one should typically have more than one degree of responsibility for any given deliverable or activity group in the RAM chart. To simplify things, we’ve assigned each participant in this scenario a certain amount of commitment. However, there is frequently white space when you create a genuine model for more than four people. In some situations, it’s okay to have someone with secondary responsibility but not primary.

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Template

Template: responsibility assignment matrix (ram) (excel), 6 steps to developing a responsibility assignment matrix (ram).

Below is a list of the 6 (six) most common steps in developing a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM).

  • Step 1: List all project tasks and deliverables
  • Step 2: Identify all project stakeholders
  • Step 3: Determine the responsibility and accountability level for each task and deliverable
  • Step 4: Assign stakeholders to each task
  • Step 5: Assign overall stakeholder
  • Step 6: Ensure all stakeholder know their responsibility

Developing Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Matrix Best Practices

Below is a list of best practice topics that can help Program Managers effectively build and use a Responsibility Assignment Matrix.

  • One stakeholder is in charge per task.
  • The least amount of people accountable, the better.
  • Be Efficient with Meetings.
  • Constant Communication.
  • Stakeholders agree on final RAM

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Lessons Learned

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) is a tool used in project management to identify and clarify the roles and responsibilities of the different people or groups working on a project. The goal of making a RAM is to make sure that all tasks are done and that responsibilities don’t overlap or get missed. Here are some things you can learn to make sure your RAM is built right:

  • Define the project’s goals and scope in detail:  Before making a RAM, it’s important to have a clear idea of the project’s goals and scope. This will help make sure that all necessary tasks are included and that the responsibilities are in line with the overall project goals.
  • Find out who all the stakeholders are and what their roles are:  A RAM should have a list of all the people or groups involved in the project, such as internal team members, external partners, and customers. There should be roles and responsibilities for each stakeholder.
  • Give each stakeholder specific tasks and responsibilities:  Instead of giving each stakeholder a general role, it is important to give them specific tasks and responsibilities. This will help make sure that no one’s responsibilities get mixed up or left out.
  • Make sure that all stakeholders know about and understand the RAM:  It is important to make sure that all stakeholders know about and understand the RAM. This can be done by having regular meetings and giving updates, as well as by putting the RAM in writing.
  • Review and update the RAM often: As the project moves forward, it may be necessary to review and update the RAM. This can help make sure that the RAM stays correct and helps the project reach its goals.

Difference Between a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RMA) and a Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) Matrix

The PMBOK Guide 4th Edition defines RACI as a RAM that is used to illustrate the connections between work packages in a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and project team members. The difference between a RAM matrix and RACI matrix is:

  • A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) describes the participation of various organizations, people, and their roles in completing tasks or deliverables in a Work Break Down Structure (WBS) for a project.
  • A Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) matrix is used on projects where multiple groups of people as assigned a task. It helps on larger projects with a lot of people and organizations. It also helps with outside stakeholders and their responsibilities on a project.
  • A RACI can have multiple RAM within it.

AcqLinks and References:

  • Template: Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Template (Word)
  • Template: Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Template (Excel)

Updated: 1/11/2024

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Example sentences assign responsibility

The health secretary would be well advised to assign responsibility for screening programmes more clearly to a single agency.
To remove him from the scene before a verdict could be reached here would make it extremely hard to assign responsibility in a fair and reasonable fashion.
Bibliographers have worked to assign responsibility for specific texts to specific printers.
Senior managers, in turn, assign responsibility for establishment of more specific internal control policies and procedures to personnel responsible for the unit's functions.
However, the national government can assign responsibility for service provision to local municipalities.

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What is a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) in Project Management?

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Introduction to Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)

Project management is a complex process that involves multiple stakeholders, tasks, and resources. To ensure the success of a project, it is crucial to assign clear roles and responsibilities to team members and accurately define their tasks. 

One tool that can help project managers achieve this goal is the Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM). In this article, we will explore the definition and benefits of RAM, as well as some examples.

If you’re looking for a RAM template that will help you assign roles and clarify responsibilities, Wrike has a customizable template ready to go.

What is a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) in project management?

A responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) in project management, also known as a RACI chart or RACI matrix, details all the necessary stakeholders and clarifies responsibilities amongst cross-functional teams and their involvement level in a project. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed and each letter corresponds to a team member.

A RAM in project management should be referred to by all parties throughout a project because it helps plan an individual’s roles and responsibilities before work begins. A RACI matrix ensures all stakeholders know who is responsible for completing a task or getting feedback on deliverables.

The four roles are broken down as follows:

  • Responsible: The person(s) completing the task
  • Accountable: The team member coordinating the actions, making decisions, and delegating to those responsible for the task
  • Consulted: The person(s) who will be communicated with regarding decisions and tasks
  • Informed: The person(s) who will be updated during the project and upon completion

Read more about RACI here . 

Identify and visualize roles seamlessly with Wrike

Responsibility assignment matrix example.

A common RAM   template looks like the example below. Notice how all stakeholders can have more than one role:

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Responsibility Assignment Matrix template

Below you can see a powerful RAM template . The chart helps with visualizing roles and workload clearly. Therefore, project managers and team members follow the progress easily and stay on track.

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Clarify roles with Wrike

In conclusion, RAM is a useful tool for any project manager who wants to ensure their team is clear on their responsibilities. It helps to establish a structured approach to project management, allowing for better communication, accountability, and ultimately, project success.

Using Wrike’s pre-built template, you can define the roles of each team member so everybody is on the same page. The template will also help you balance your workload and create complete transparency on your team structure.

What is a RACI Chart?

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Responsibility Assignment Matrix: Template, Example & Benefits

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Your team is the most crucial resource in completing a job. They must adhere to the project's schedule and budget. Controlling the project requires everyone involved to understand their roles and duties when carrying out tasks and accomplishing project objectives. How can all the participants in a project be coordinated so that they are aware of what they are doing and do not prevent others from carrying out their tasks? An assignment of responsibility matrix can be useful.

Your project will have a productive crew thanks to an assignment matrix. You can take an online PMP course to learn the details included in RAM, Responsibility Assignment Matrix in project management, and Responsibility Assignment Matrix example, to advance your career.

What is a Responsibility Assignment Matrix in Project Management?

So, what is the responsibility assignment matrix?  A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM), sometimes referred to as a RACI chart or RACI matrix, in project management identifies all relevant stakeholders and specifies roles for cross-functional teams and their level of involvement in a project. Each letter in the acronym RACI, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed, refers to a different team member in the Responsibility Assignment Matrix in Project Management.

1. Responsible

The team member that oversees finishing the assignment is the person responsible for the RAM, Responsibility Assignment Matrix. The person in charge may be tasked with gathering all the visual and data assets required to put together the presentation if your team is working on a pitch deck (Responsible for executing the task).

2. Accountable

The responsible team member distributes the tasks to the other team members and ensures that they are finished accurately and on time. This team member oversees making sure the project is completed on schedule and that the tasks are fairly distributed among the accountable parties (Has governing & directing authority).

3. Consulted

A responsible party in Responsibility Assignment Matrix Project Management may frequently need to consult an expert, who serves as the consulted person, to finish certain responsibilities. A professional analysis of the consulted party is required when someone is tasked with gathering marketing statistics for a presentation. They also need to ensure that the data the responsible party is required to submit is accurate (Provide insights, analysis or expert judgment).

4. Informed

The informed party needs to be aware of when the major project components are finished even though they may not be directly involved in all the steps to ensure that everything is running smoothly. The informed team member must be aware of any delays or stalls in the project as they must complete their tasks (Updated with project information and outcome).

Responsibility Assignment Matrix in Project Management

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Goal in Project Management

The goal of the Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) is to clearly define roles and responsibilities of everyone on a project team. This ensures that everyone understands their role and how it fits into the bigger picture. RAM also allows for quick identification of whom to contact when an issue arises. It might also be applied within a working group to establish authority levels, roles, and duties for tasks.

The matrix format displays each person's associated actions and each person's associated people. To avoid confusion, this makes sure that there is only one person responsible for each task. It is also important to outline the dates and reminders for each participant, so that they are aware of their deliverables/plans to fulfill the deliverables. The best Project Management Certification programs online will teach you how to make efficient decisions and effectively use RAM.

How to Create a Responsibility Assignment Matrix?

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) is a table that shows the tasks needed to be completed as part of a project, who is responsible for each task, and when the task needs to be completed. Making a matrix to distribute responsibilities is not as challenging as getting everyone on board with their respective jobs and responsibilities.

You should therefore involve your staff in the process, receive their feedback, and eventually secure their buy-in without expending excessive time and effort on it. You will have a successful responsibility assignment if you follow these instructions to ensure that everyone is on the same page. 

  • List every person involved in the project, including the team, stakeholders, and everyone in between.
  •  List each project deliverable that you can think of. To make sure you do not overlook any, use a work breakdown framework.  
  •  To discuss how to carry out the tasks and produce the deliverables, meet with the team members. The duty and authority of the team for each assignment must be discussed.
  •  Utilizing a table with the project tasks specified in the left-hand column, create a Responsibility Assignment Matrix. Print the names of everyone involved in the project across the top.
  • Assign whether a project team member is liable, accountable, consulted, or informed where the tasks meet them.  
  •  Share the completed Responsibility Assignment Matrix Template Word with the project team and stakeholders. If necessary, conduct a meeting to ensure that everyone is aware of their responsibilities for the project. Print a copy, and if you are working in a common location, post it.

Developing Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) Best Practices

The best practices for developing a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) will vary depending on the specific project and organization. However, some tips on how to develop a RAM matrix effectively include the following:

  • Define the project scope and objectives clearly, so that all stakeholders understand the parameters of the project and what is expected to be accomplished.
  • Assign clear roles and responsibilities to individuals and teams so that everyone knows who is responsible for what aspect of the project.
  • Make sure that the Responsibility Assignment Matrix PMP is kept up to date as the project progresses so that everyone is aware of any changes in roles and responsibilities.
  • Use the RAM matrix as a tool to help identify potential risks and issues related to the project so that they can be addressed early on.
  • One stakeholder leads a task.
  • The lesser number of people are accountable, the better.
  • Act efficiently with meetings.
  • Continuous communication.
  • Stakeholder agreement on final RAM.

Responsibility Assignment Matrix Examples and Templates

  • Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RACI) 
  • RACI-VS (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed- “V”erification and “S”ign off)
  • RASCI (Responsible, Accountable, Support, Consulted, Informed)
  • RAC (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted)
  • ARCI (Accountable, Responsible, Consulted, Informed)
  • RATSI (Responsibility, Authority, Task, Support, Informed)
  • PACSI (Perform, Accountable, Control, Suggest, Informed)
  • RACIQ (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, Quality Review)
  • DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed)
  • CAIRO (Consulted, Accountable, Informed, Responsible, Omitted)

sample responsible assignment matrix - RACI

Downloadable Responsibility Assignment Matrix Template Excel

Download the Responsibility Assignment Matrix Template (xlsx) here!

This Responsibility Assignment Matrix template is available for free in both Excel and OpenDocument Spreadsheet formats. The template can be completely modified using Microsoft Excel and adjusted to meet the needs of your project. To make it simple to understand what is required of each worker on each task, the template employs conditional formatting to change the color of each cell.

Download a Printable Responsibility Assignment Matrix PDF

Download the Responsibility Assignment Matrix Template (PDF) here!

If you intend to design a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM), you may require samples and templates to use as a guide, regardless of whether you are managing an event, a construction project, or a restaurant. Some of the templates are-

  • Responsibility Assignment Matrix Sample
  • Responsibility Assignment Matrix for Construction Project Template
  • Basic Responsibility Assignment Matrix Sample
  • Responsibility Assignment Matrix in PDF

Benefits of Responsibility Assignment Matrix

There are many benefits of the Responsibility Assignment Matrix. One benefit is that it helps to ensure that everyone on a project team understands their roles and responsibilities. This can help to prevent misunderstandings and conflict between team members. Another benefit of using RAM is that it can help to improve communication between team members.

By clearly defining roles and responsibilities, team members will know whom to go to for specific information or tasks. This can help to avoid confusion and delays. Lastly, RAM can help to improve project management by providing a clear overview of who is responsible for what. This can help project managers to identify potential problems or areas where there may be a lack of resources.

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A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) is a tool used to identify and define the roles and responsibilities of individuals and groups within an organization. It is a means of clarifying who is responsible for what and ensuring that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities. RAM can be used to create accountability and ownership for tasks and projects, and to identify potential areas of conflict.

It is a valuable tool for effective project management and can help to ensure that everyone involved in a project is aware of their roles and responsibilities. It can also help to identify potential areas of conflict and ensure that tasks are properly assigned. The KnowledgeHut online PMP course will give you an insight into the Responsibility Assignment Matrix and can be a helpful tool for any project manager.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. what is included in a responsibility assignment matrix.

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) is a tool used to help define and assign roles and responsibilities for a project or process. The matrix typically includes a list of tasks or deliverables and the people or groups responsible for each. 

2. What can a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) eliminate?

RAM eliminates ambiguity and confusion over who is responsible for what on a project. It also provides a clear overview of who is responsible for each task, making it easier to hold team members accountable.

3. What does a Responsibility Assignment Matrix not show?

The duty assignment matrix links resources to the tasks or work packages they must do, but it does not indicate when they will be required to do their work.

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A template-based approach for responsibility management in executable business processes

Cristina cabanillas.

a Institute for Information Business , Vienna University of Economics and Business , Vienna, Austria

Manuel Resinas

b Depto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos , University of Seville , Seville, Spain

Antonio Ruiz-Cortés

Process-oriented organisations need to manage the different types of responsibilities their employees may have w.r.t. the activities involved in their business processes. Despite several approaches provide support for responsibility modelling, in current Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) the only responsibility considered at runtime is the one related to performing the work required for activity completion. Others like accountability or consultation must be implemented by manually adding activities in the executable process model, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we address this limitation by enabling current BPMS to execute processes in which people with different responsibilities interact to complete the activities. We introduce a metamodel based on Responsibility Assignment Matrices (RAM) to model the responsibility assignment for each activity, and a flexible template-based mechanism that automatically transforms such information into BPMN elements, which can be interpreted and executed by a BPMS. Thus, our approach does not enforce any specific behaviour for the different responsibilities but new templates can be modelled to specify the interaction that best suits the activity requirements. Furthermore, libraries of templates can be created and reused in different processes. We provide a reference implementation and build a library of templates for a well-known set of responsibilities.

1. Introduction

Organisations need to manage the different types of responsibilities that their employees may have with respect to all the activities that are daily carried out within them. Process-oriented organisations need to do it, in addition, in accordance to the business processes in place. In this context, responsibilites are defined at different levels. As evidenced by several studies, there are four acknowledged process positions (business process director, business process consultant, business process architect and business process analyst) and a specific set of responsibilities associated to each of them (Antonucci and Goeke 2011 ). However, organisations need to control not only the execution of processes as a whole but also the execution of every single activity carried out within them, which relates to a key role in process execution: the process participants. Activities often require the collaboration among several people with different responsibilities, e.g., people responsible for performing the work, people acting as consultants who provide valuable input for the completion of the activity, and people accountable for the results. Therefore, there are also responsibilities at activity level involving, among others, accountability and consultation.

Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs) stand out of Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) as a mechanism for process automation. Specifically, the purpose of a BPMS is to coordinate an automated business process so that the work is done at the right time by the right resource (Dumas et al. 2013 ). They rely on the description of business processes as process models represented with different notations, such as (EPC) (Mendling, Neumann, and Nüttgens 2005 ) or the de-facto standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) (OMG 2011 ). However, although BPMSs use business process models for automation, there is still a gap between these executable process models and business-oriented process models used for communication and analysis. Because of their intent, the latter are not as precise and complete as an executable process model must be (Dumas et al. 2013 ). As a consequence, different methodologies (Dumas et al. 2013 ) and techniques (Graml, Bracht, and Spies 2008 ; Caron and Vanthienen 2016 ) for transforming business-oriented process models into executable ones have been developed. Still, this transformation is known to be slow and error prone (Alotaibi and Liu 2017 ).

In this paper, we focus on this issue in the context of responsibility management. Nowadays, BPMSs are increasingly providing support for modelling activities that involve several people with different responsibilities using advanced resource assignment languages (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ) or supplementary models like RACI matrices (Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés 2011b ). However, this support tends to be limited to documentation and reporting purposes. Just a few BPMSs consider several responsibilities associated to an activity during process execution and the existing support suffers from generalisability and flexibility issues. Concepts like accountability or consultation, common in the domain of responsibility management, have to be implemented during the transformation from business-oriented process models to executable process models by manually adding activities for them. Furthermore, this has to be done for each activity that involves several responsibilities in all automated business processes in the organisation, which is time-consuming and error-prone as these transformation tasks usually are (Alotaibi and Liu 2017 ). Moreover, if the responsibilities defined for an activity change, the activities added manually to the process model may also change, which adds additional work that may be significant given the continuous organisational changes (Aldin and de Cesare 2011 ).

Two facts have contributed to the lack of advanced support for responsibility management. First, most process model notations used in current BPMSs for process execution support only one type of responsibility by default, despite some of them like BPMN allow including additional responsibilities in an ad-hoc fashion (OMG 2011 ). This lack of standardisation for managing various types of responsibilities discourages BPMS developers to support different responsibilities in their systems. Second, the way people with different responsibilities interact within an activity is domain-specific. At least, it depends on the organisation and the activity. For instance, some activities may require partial approvals of the work being performed for their completion, whereas for others, such an approval may only be required at the end of the execution or not required at all. Therefore, supporting different responsibilities is not only a matter of assigning new tasks to a worklist, but it is also necessary to find a mechanism that coordinates them in a flexible way.

In this paper, we automate this transition from busines-oriented to executable business processes in the context of responsibility management by enabling current BPMSs to execute processes in which people with different responsibilities interact to perform process activities. The approach involves two artifacts. On the one hand, we address the modelling of different responsibilities by extending a (RAM) (Website 2016 ) with information required for process execution. On the other hand, we introduce a template-based technique for transforming such information into BPMN elements that can be interpreted by a BPMS so that existing BPMN execution support suffices to automate process models that involve activities with several people with different responsibilities. This idea was previously described in Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés ( 2012 ) but the work has been extended in several directions, in particular: (i) our current approach does no longer enforce any specific behaviour for the people with different responsibilities that work together in an activity, but new templates can be modelled to specify the interaction that best suits the requirements of each activity. In fact, the whole template-based mechanism is new; (ii) our current approach is not limited to a restricted set of responsibilities anymore, hence gaining generalisability; and (iii) we have refined the previous metamodel and its semantics has been properly defined.

Our approach has two additional advantages. First, it is independent of the platform and hence, the models obtained can be used by any BPMS that supports BPMN . Second, the original structure of the process model remains unchanged after including the templates defined for modelling responsibilities, since the modifications are done at subprocess level. This provides transparency and does not affect the readability of the original model.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes a scenario that will be used throughout the paper as a running example. Section 3 summarises the related work. Section 4 motivates the work in line with the research method used. Section 5 presents our approach for modelling responsibility aspects in process activities. Section 6 introduces our template-based approach for generating resource-aware BPMN models. Section 7 describes the ways in which we have validated the approach. Section 8 reflects on advantages and limitations of the approach. Finally, Section 9 outlines the conclusions and directions for future work.

2. Running example

The following example is used to illustrate the importance of supporting the collaboration of several people with different responsibilities in a process activity.

Table 1 depicts an excerpt of an organisational model for a project called HRMS. Specifically, it shows the organisational roles assigned to the resources that contribute to the project. 1 Figure 1 shows a simplified version of the procedure to manage the trip to a conference according to the rules of the University of Seville (Spain). In particular, it represents a collaboration between two processes modelled with BPMN 2.0 2 (OMG 2011 ): one process is developed at pool Research Vice-chancellorship and the other at pool ISA Research Group , to which the organisational model previously described belongs. That process starts when a researcher requests for authorisation to attend the conference, for which an authorisation form is filled out with the details of the applicant and the funding source, and sent for external assessment to the Vice-chancellorship. After evaluation, a notification from the Vice-chancellorship is received informing about the approval or rejection of the request, which will be checked by the researcher . In the absence of problems, the researcher must register at the conference and make the reservations required.

Excerpt of the organisational model for project HRMS (WP = Work Package).

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Business process to manage the trip to attend a conference.

The previous description of the process is only half of the picture because it assumes that only one person is involved in each activity, in this case a certain researcher. However, for most activities several people are actually involved in them with different responsibilities. For instance, the coordinator of the project that will finance the trip expenses is accountable for activity Prepare Authorisation and the clerk of the project helps the researcher in this task by providing the information required about the funding source; in addition, the account administrator and the leader of the project’s work package related to the subject of the paper to be presented in the conference (or the subject of the conference, in case of no accepted publications) must be informed about the trip request. Following up on this, the project coordinator and the account administrator are informed about the result of the request when executing activity Check Response. In activity Register at Conference, the project coordinator can be consulted about details on the registration process, such as the type of registration, and both the project coordinator and the account administrator must be informed after the registration has been done. Finally, in activity Make Reservations, the clerk of the project can help the researcher, if required, and the account administrator and the project coordinator can also be consulted about details on this activity.

The challenge is to model all those details and come up with a responsibility-aware process model that can be executed taking the responsibilities into account.

3. Related work

Responsibility management in business processes is a part of resource management in business processes, which involves the assignment of resources to process activities at design time as potential participants and the allocation of resources to activities at run time as actual participants.

Resource assignment languages (van der Aalst and ter Hofstede 2005 ; Cabanillas et al. 2015b ; Bertino, Ferrari, and Atluri 1999 ; Strembeck and Mendling 2011 ; Casati et al. 1996 ; Scheer 2000 ; Du et al. 1999 ; Tan, Crampton, and Gunter 2004 ; Cabanillas et al. 2015a ; Wolter and Schaad 2007 ; Awad et al. 2009 ; Stroppi, Chiotti, and Villarreal 2011 ) serve the former purpose by enabling the definition of the conditions that the members of an organisation must meet in order to be allowed to participate in the activities of the processes executed in it, e.g., to belong to a specific department or to have certain skills. The outcome is a resource-aware process model . The set of conditions that can be defined depicts the expressiveness of the language and is usually evaluated with a subset of the well-known workflow resource patterns (Russell et al. 2005 ), namely, the creation patterns, which include, among others: Direct, Organisational, Role-Based , and Capability-Based Distribution , or the ability to specify the identity, position, role or capabilities of the resource that will take part in a task, respectively; (SoD) , or the ability to specify that two tasks must be allocated to different resources in a given process instance; and Retain Familiar (also known as Binding of Duties (BoD)) , or the ability to allocate an activity instance within a given process instance to the same resource that performed a preceding activity instance. A comparison of resource assignment languages can be found in Cabanillas et al. ( 2015b ).

Resource allocation techniques aim at distributing actual work to appropriate resources so that process instances are completed properly, e.g, in terms of high quality and low time and cost (Havur et al. 2015 ). All process engines must be provided with some resource allocation mechanism(s) in order to automate process execution.

Traditional resource management in business processes considers that a process activity requires the workforce of one single resource who is in charge of the activity from the beginning to the end of its execution. However, common scenarios like the one described in Section 2 show the importance of other types of responsibilities, which tend to be disregarded by existing resource management approaches. In the following, we review the current state of the art on responsibility management in business processes, which is the problem addressed in this paper, and then report on approaches for process modelling based on templates, which relates to our solution.

3.1. Responsibility management in business processes

In this section, we first introduce a generic responsibility management mechanism that is independent of process modelling notations or BPMS . Afterwards, we explore the related work for responsibility management in business processes in three groups: (i) the support provided by existing process modelling notations, (ii) the support provided by current modelling software tools and BPMS, and (iii) research proposals developed to bridge existing gaps.

3.1.1. Responsibility assignment matrices (RAMs)

A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) provides a way to plan, organise and coordinate work that consists of assigning different degrees of responsibility to the members of an organisation for each activity undertaken in it (Website 2016 ). RAMs were defined independently of Business Process Management (BPM) and thus, they are suitable for both process- and non process-oriented organisations. In the context of RAMs, the different responsibilities that may be assigned to an activity are usually called roles or task duties (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ).

RAMs are becoming a recommendation for the representation of the distribution of work in organisations. As a matter of fact, a specific type of RAMs called RACI (ARIS 2012 ) is a component of Six Sigma, 3 a methodology to improve the service or product that a company offers to its customers. There are also ongoing efforts to map RACI to the LEAN and CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC) frameworks (Nuzen and Dayton 2011 ). The former defines a set of principles for continuous process improvement. The latter provides guidance for applying Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) best practices in a service provider organisation. Similarly, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework defines the ITIL RACI matrices 4 as the way to illustrate the participation of the ITIL roles in the ITIL processes. ITIL is the worldwide de-facto standard for service management. Specifically, it uses a modality of RAMs called RASCI (Website 2014 ), which relies on the following five responsibilities:

  • Responsible (R) : person who must perform the work, responsible for the activity until the work is finished and approved by the person accountable for the activity. There is typically only one person responsible for an activity.
  • Accountable – also Approver or Final Approving Authority – (A) : person who must approve the work performed by the person responsible for an activity, and who becomes responsible for it after approval. There is generally one person accountable for each activity.
  • Support (S) : person who may assist in completing an activity by actively contributing in its execution, i.e., the person in charge can delegate work to her. In general, there may be several people assigned to this responsibility for an activity instance.
  • Consulted – sometimes Counsel – (C) : person whose opinion is sought while performing the work, and with whom there is two-way communication. She helps to complete the activity in a passive way. In general, there may be several people assigned to this responsibility for an activity instance.
  • Informed (I) : person who is kept up-to-date about the progress of an activity and/or the results of the work, and with whom there is just one-way communication. In general, there may be more than one person informed about an activity.

Table 2 illustrates an example of a RAM for the scenario described in Section 2 , specifically a RASCI matrix. The rows represent the process activities, the columns of the matrix are organisational roles, 5 and each cell contains zero or more RASCI initials indicating the responsibility of that role on that activity.

RASCI matrix for the process at pool ISA Research Group.

Note that RAMs are intended to be a responsibility modelling mechanism and are not provided with support for automated analysis that could help to use them together with business processes during process execution. Their expressive power is high in terms of the number of responsibilities that can be assigned but low regarding the number of workflow resource patterns supported, as constraints like sod and bod cannot be defined.

3.1.2. Process modelling notations

The default support for responsibility management in current process modelling notations is limited. BPMN 2.0 (OMG 2011 ), the de-facto standard for process modelling, provides a mechanism to assign responsibilities to an activity. However, the only responsibility type that is defined by default is Responsible (so-called Potential Owner in BPMN). Other types of responsibilities can be added by extending the BPMN metamodel. In addition, nothing is said about the implications of adding new responsibilities during process execution.

The EPC notation (Dumas, van der Aalst, and ter Hofstede 2005 ) is more expressive than BPMN for resource modelling in the sense that it provides a specific representation of organisational units and allows defining organisational relations. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no support for responsibilities other than the resource in charge of executing the activity.

The so-called activity partitions of Unified Modeling Language (UML) Activity Diagrams (Russell et al. 2006 ) are classifiers similar to the BPMN swimlanes, although enriched with dimensions for hierarchical modelling. Therefore, they allow grouping process activities according to any criterion, which includes organisational information. Besides that, this modelling approach is very little expressive in terms of the support provided for the creation patterns (Russell et al. 2005 ). There is no notion of responsibility modelling either.

Finally, BPEL4People (OASIS 2009 ) is an extension of the BPEL notation (OASIS 2007 ) based on the WS-HumanTask specification (OASIS 2010 ), which enables the integration of human beings in service-oriented applications. It provides support for the execution of business processes with three types of responsibilities, namely: Responsible, Accountable and Informed. However, although it provides a rather flexible mechanism for defining the notifications that the people with responsibility Informed receive, the participation of people with responsibility Accountable is limited to intervening when a deadline is missed. Other forms of interaction, such as checking that an activity was correctly performed, are not allowed.

3.1.3. Modelling software tools and BPMS

Modelling software tools, such as Visual Paradigm, 6 facilitate the automatic generation of a RACI matrix from a resource-aware BPMN model. Specifically, the responsibility type Responsible can be automatically extracted and the RACI matrix can then be manually filled out to include information about the other types of responsibilities. However, the output is just used for documentation purposes, since BPMN does not support the definition of responsibilities Accountable, Consulted and Informed.

Signavio Process Editor 7 also allows for defining RACI responsibilities in process models by making use of BPMN elements. While those models can be used for generating reports subsequently, process engines will not take into account the responsibilities Accountable, Consulted and Informed for automatic process execution.

The support for responsibility management is a novel functionality in BPMSs . Bizagi 8 and ARIS (Scheer 2000 ) allow for the definition of RASCI responsibilities in BPMN models by making use of extended attributes in process activities. Nevertheless, similar to the tools focused on modelling, only the responsibility Responsible is considered for execution and the rest are used for process documentation and reporting. RACI matrices can be defined in the Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 9 aside of a process model for broader documentation of the responsibilities involved in the process (Cumberlidge 2007 ). To the best of our knowledge, only (YAWL) (Adams 2016 ) slightly supports responsibility-aware process execution by means of the concept of secondary resources (human and non-human), which may assist in the completion of the work (hence providing support). Any kind of support for responsibility modelling and execution other than Responsible is still missing, however, in other BPMSs, such as Camunda 10 and Bonita BPM. 11

3.1.4. Research proposals

Due to the limitations of the process modelling notations and systems for responsibility management a few research proposals have been developed to support the assignment of different responsibilities to process activities and the automation of such responsibility-aware process models. In particular, Grosskopf ( 2007 ) extended BPMN 1.0 to support accountability.

Resource Assignment Language (RAL) (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ; Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés 2011a ) is an expressive language for defining resource assignments that supports all the creation patterns (Russell et al. 2005 ). RAL is independent of the process modelling notation. Therefore, it can be decoupled from the process model or it can be integrated in it, as shown in Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés ( 2011 ) with BPMN. Furthermore, RAL is suited to be used for modelling any kind of responsibility as long as that is supported by the process modelling notation with which it is used.

A graphical notation with a similar expressive power than RAL (RALph) was designed to allow for graphically defining resource assignments in process models (Cabanillas et al. 2015a ). Similarly to the case of RAL, RALph is not actually equipped with support for modelling specific responsibilities. Therefore, that support depends on the process modelling notation with which RALph is used. Otherwise, the notation should be extended.

To a greater or lesser extent, these proposals only address responsibility modelling and they do not provide details about the implications on the execution of the responsibility-aware process models generated.

Since process execution is also a concern and the different responsibilities modelled with a process should also be considered at run time, the approach described in Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés ( 2011b ) presented a pattern-based mechanism for including specific activities in a BPMN model that represent accountability, support, consultancy and notification functions. The result is thus a responsibility-aware executable process model that can be automated by BPMN process engines. However, due to the extra elements added in order to include RASCI responsibilities, the model is likely to become unreadable and deviate from the original one, hence turning out to be less eligible for other purposes, such as documentation, due to the large amount of implementation details. As an illustrative example, applying this technique to the scenario described in Section 2 , the number of process activities would increase from 5 to 15. Moreover, the RASCI patterns defined are fixed and hence, there is no flexibility for adapting the joint use of the responsibilities to the organisational needs. Our preliminary work in this area (Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés 2012 ) also generated executable process models provided with RASCI information avoiding the aforementioned readability problem. However, flexibility remained an issue, as the way of including responsibilities in the process model was fixed.

3.2. Template-based process modelling

Process templates have been defined with different notations and used for different purposes and in different domains. For instance, BPMN templates were defined for generating so-called business process studios by means of model transformations (Mos and Cortés-Cornax 2016 ). Configurable processes rely on process fragments or templates for adapting an abstract process to a specific context. They have been used, e.g., for addressing the problem of variability in service implementation, a.k.a. service differentiation, with BPEL (Tao and Yang 2007 ) as well as the problem of reference model implementation with Configurable epc (C-EPC) (Recker et al. 2005 ). In addition, configurable processes have been applied in industry to solve real problems, as described in Gottschalk, van der Aalst, and Jansen-Vullers ( 2007 ) for SAP processes.

Most of these approaches, however, focus on control-flow aspects of business process and disregard other perspectives. Nevertheless, notations like the one presented in La Rosa et al. ( 2011 ) allow for defining configurable process models considering control flow, data and resources. These three perspectives are also supported by a template-based approach for modelling process performance indicators (del-Río-Ortega et al. 2016 ).

Support for responsibility management in business processes.  √ indicates that the feature is supported,  ≈  indicates that the feature is partly supported, − indicates that the feature is not supported, and n/a indicates that the evaluation criterion is not applicable.

All the previous approaches have shown benefits for the purpose they were conceived. However, none of them has taken into consideration activity responsibilities since they did not specifically focus on the organisational perspective of business processes.

4. Motivation and research method

To conduct this research we have followed design science principles as suggested by Hevner et al. ( 2004 ) and, in particular, we have applied the design science research methodology (DSRM) (Peffers et al. 2007 ) as follows:

  • The responsibilities supported, in most cases in terms of the well-known RASCI responsibilities (Website 2014 ).
  • The way in which responsibilities are modelled, differentiating between ‘in’ (i.e., the resource-related information is represented within the process model) and ‘out’ (i.e., the resource-related information is separated from the process model). This relates to the degree of decoupling.
  • The support for the automated execution of processes including the different responsibilities.

Several conclusions can be drawn from this analysis. First, many proposals from industry (notations, modelling tools and BPMS) recognise the importance of modelling different types of responsibilities for each activity and provide some kind of support for them, although this support is limited to modelling and documentation purposes, i.e., business-oriented process models.

Second, the RASCI concepts seem to be the most extended mechanism to model responsibility management in business processes. Indeed, many software modelling tools and BPMS use them and automatically generate RAMs to model or document responsibilities. The biggest limitation of this way of proceeding is that the expressiveness of RAMs for resource assignment in business processes is restricted to three creation patterns, namely, Direct-based Distribution, Role-based Distribution and Organisational Distribution . Patterns like SoD or BoD are not supported by default by RAMs . This is not a significant problem if RAMs are used solely for documentation purposes because they can be accompanied with a description of these concerns in natural language. However, it is an important limitation if RAMs were used as the model to guide the automated execution of a process in a BPMS.

Finally, the support for automating the resulting responsibility-aware process models is limited. When existing, it either does not cover all the RASCI responsibilities or is not flexible enough to accommodate different interaction patterns between the people that collaborate in an activity with different responsibilities.

The result is that there is a gap between the responsibility types that are modelled in business-oriented process models such as the one described in the running example ( Section 2 ) or the use case ( Section 7.3 ) and the ability of BPMSs to automate their execution. Consequently, to enforce their correct execution, it is necessary to implement them by manually adding activities for them in the executable process model. This is not desirable, especially when the process model has many activities (it is not uncommon to find process models with more than 15 activities (Mendling, Reijers, and van der Aalst 2010 )) and there are several responsibilities for each activity (which is not uncommon either, e.g., in best practice frameworks). For instance, in our running example, despite its small size, at least 8 activities have to be added manually to model all responsibilities, one for each responsibility type assigned to an activity. The problem gets even worse when either the process or the responsibility assignment changes, because the modified process has to be changed by hand again. This involves first checking what has changed, then understanding the impact of this change in the modified process model and finally, changing the modified process model appropriately. This time-consuming and error-prone task is the problem we are facing in this research.

  • G1. Generalisability: in order to adapt to the organisational structure, the responsibility modelling technique should be able to deal with any kind of responsibility instead of sticking to a predefined set of them
  • G2. Flexibility: in order to increase usability, the approach should leave freedom to each organisation to define how the interaction between the people that collaborate in an activity with different responsibilities takes place. Furthermore, the process flow chosen has a direct impact on process performance, as described in Lam, Ip, and Lau ( 2009 ).
  • Design and development phase : This phase involved the design and development of two novel artefacts, namely, (i) the RAM BI metamodel, which extends RAMs with information required for process execution (cf. Section 5 ), and (ii) a template-based technique called RAM2BPMN for transforming such information into BPMN elements that can be interpreted by a BPMN process engine (cf. Section 6 ).
  • Demonstration phase : This phase involved the development of a software prototype that effectively showed that it was possible to transform the information of RAM BI models into BPMN elements automatically using templates. Furthermore, it also showed that the solution is platform independent since it was used to generate process models that were executable in different BPMS (cf. Section 7.1 ).
  • Evaluation phase : The proposal has been evaluated in two different directions. On the one hand, we have used our approach to model interaction patterns between the people that collaborate in an activity with different responsibilities to validate that our solution was flexible enough to accommodate those interactions (cf. Section 7.2 ). On the other hand, we have applied our approach to two real scenarios in order to show its applicability and the advantages gained by its use (cf. Section 7.3 ).

These phases were developed by means of several iterative cycles. In an initial cycle, we partially defined the problem, reviewed existing research literature and current solutions from industry, and developed an initial solution that included a first version of the RAM BI metamodel and a predefined interaction for RASCI responsibilities (Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés 2011b ). Then, subsequent cycles were necessary to refine the RAM BI metamodel, to make the approach independent of RASCI responsibilities and to give flexibility to the approach by means of the template-based technique.

5. RAM BI : resource assignment matrices with binding information

A typical RAM enables an assignment of resources based on the organisational entities placed at the columns of the matrix, which usually are organisational roles. This limits the expressiveness of the resource assignments in two directions. On the one hand, it is not possible to set additional constraints related to the person assigned to the activity, such as requiring specific capabilities or excluding performers of previous activities to enforce an SOD . For instance, in the example of Section 2 the PhD student that is responsible for the activity Send Authorisation is not any PhD student but the one that prepared the authorisation form. On the other hand, it limits the ability to put additional constraints on the organisational entities used as columns. For instance, in the same example, the role project coordinator should not refer to any project coordinator, but the coordinator of the project to which the authorisation that is being requested belongs.

In the remainder of this section, we first introduce the RAM BI metamodel, then we present its semantics and at last, we provide details of a specific instantiation of the metamodel with a specific resource assignment language.

5.1. RAM BI metamodel

RAM BI matrices (i.e., RAMs with binding information) is the extension we propose to overcome these limitations of the expressiveness of RAMs. It complements a RAMs with binding information that provides the specific conditions that the individuals have to fulfil in order to participate with a specific type of responsibility in an activity.

These conditions are expressed using a resource assignment language. From an abstract perspective, a resource assignment language ℒ is composed of a set of expressions that use the different entities that are part of an organisational metamodel, such as people, roles or positions, for selecting elements of an organisational model defined according to the organisational metamodel. In other words, it can be seen as a query language for the organisational model. Accordingly, the semantics of a resource assignment language ℒ can be defined by a function m a p ℒ that maps each expression in ℒ to a set of elements of the organisational model that is being queried.

For instance, a resource assignment language ℒ that queries an organisational model defined according to the organisational metamodel depicted in Figure 2 could have expressions that select people that play a certain role (e.g., selecting all people that have the role researcher ) or that have performed a previous activity in the process (e.g., selecting all people that have performed activity Prepare authorisation in the current instance), amongst others. Furthermore, a resource assignment language also can have expressions to select not only people but other elements of an organisationl model such as organisational units or roles. For instance, we can query the model to obtain all positions that belong to an organisational unit.

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Excerpt of the organisational model described by Russell et al. ( 2004 ).

Using a resource assignment language, a RAM BI model can be formalised as follows.

Let 𝒯𝒟 be the responsibility types that can be used in a RAMs, and let ℒ be a resource assignment language where κ and χ are the set of expressions to select organisational entities and people, respectively. A RAM BI is a tuple M = (𝒜, 𝒪ℛ, ℬℛ,  o c ,  a r ) , where:

  • 𝒜 = { a 1 , ...,  a n } is the set of activities that appear in the rows of the RAM BI , 𝒜 ≠ ∅ .
  • 𝒪ℛ = { o r 1 , ...,  o r n } is the set of organisational roles that appear in the columns of the RAM BI , 𝒪ℛ ≠ ∅ .
  • ℬℛ ⊆ 𝒜 × 𝒪ℛ × 𝒯𝒟 is the set of BoundRole s defined in M . A BoundRole ( a ,  o r ,  t d ) represents a type of responsibility t d assigned to a Role o r of the organisational model for a given Activity a of a process. In other words, BoundRoles represent the letters that appear in the cells of a RAM.
  • o c :ℬℛ →  κ is a partial function that assigns an organisational context to a BoundRole .
  • a r :ℬℛ →  χ is a partial function that assigns additional restrictions to a BoundRole .

In this definition, the binding information is provided by functions o c and a r , namely: (i) o c indicates additional restrictions that apply to the organisational entity used as column, such as the organisational unit to which the role must belong for a specific BoundRole ; and (ii) a r is used to specify restrictions on the people that can have a certain responsibility in an activity, e.g., to have knowledge on a specific subject or to have performed a previous activity in the process.

Table 4 defines a set of auxiliary functions that are used in the following sections to manipulate the RAM BI matrix M .

Auxiliary functions for the RAM BI metamodel.

5.2. Semantics of the RAM BI metamodel

Giving semantics to a RAM BI means to determine which are the people that can have a certain type of responsibility in a given activity according to the information included in a RAM BI model. To do so, we rely on a function m a p ℬℛ that determines the people that fulfill the conditions of a BoundedRole . Intuitively, this function can be defined as follows:

  • If the BoundedRole b has no binding information (i.e., o c ( b ) and a r ( b ) are undefined), then the people that fulfill the condition of b are those people that play the role identified in the BoundedRole (e.g., any researcher).
  • If the BoundedRole b has an organisational context defined (e.g., a reserch project), then the people that fulfill the condition of b are those people that play the role identified in the BoundedRole within the organisational context provided (e.g., any researcher in a specific research project.)
  • If the BoundedRole b has an additional restriction defined (e.g., being responsible for activity Prepare authorisation), then the people that fulfill the condition of b are those people that play the role identified in the BoundedRole and fulfill the additional restrictions (e.g., researchers that are responsible for activity Prepare authorisation.)
  • Finally, if the BoundedRole b has both an organisational context and an additional restriction defined, then the people that fulfill the condition of b are those that play the role identified in the BoundedRole within the organisational context provided and fulfill the additional restrictions.

This can be formalised as follows.

Let O be an organisational model with P people. Let ℒ be a resource expression language that can query model O whose semantics is defined by function m a p ℒ . Let O C be the set of all possible organisational contexts for a role o r  ∈ 𝒪ℛ in model O , and let p ( o r ,  o c ) ⊆  P be the set of people that have role o r in context o c according to O . The semantics of each BoundRole of a RAM BI M = (𝒜, 𝒪ℛ, ℬℛ,  o c ,  a r ) is defined by function m a p ℬℛ :ℬℛ → 𝒫( P ) as follows:

This function gives semantics to the resource assignment specified in each BoundRole (i.e., in each cell of the RAM BI ). However, this does not specify the semantics when there are several BoundRoles with the same responsibility for the same activity (i.e., the same responsibility appears in more than one cell in the same row), which is common for responsibilities like Consulted, Support or Informed. Since no formal semantics for RAMs have been defined, several different interpretations can be done in different contexts:

  • Only one person can do the responsibility. This person must fulfil the conditions of the resource assignment specified in any of the bound roles defined for the same responsibility and the same activity.
  • Only one person can do the responsibility but this person must fulfil the conditions of the resource assignment specified in all the bound roles defined for the same responsibility and the same activity.
  • Several people can do the responsibility; one for each bound role defined for the same responsibility and the same activity. Each of these people must fulfil the conditions of the resource assignment specified for their respective bound role.

These interpretations can be formalised as follows.

Let M = (𝒜, 𝒪ℛ, ℬℛ,  o c ,  a r ) be a RAM BI model, and let 𝒯𝒟 be the type of responsibilities that can be used in M :

  • The semantics of the first interpretation is defined as function o r M a p M :𝒜 × 𝒯𝒟 → 𝒫( P ) as follows: o r M a p M ( a ,  t d ) = ∪ b r ∈ f i l t e r M ( a , t d ) m a p ℬℛ ( b r )
  • The semantics of the second interpretation is defined as function a n d M a p M :𝒜 × 𝒯𝒟 → 𝒫( P ) as follows: a n d M a p M ( a ,  t d ) = ∩ b r ∈ f i l t e r M ( a , t d ) m a p ℬℛ ( b r )
  • The semantics of the third interpretation is defined as function m a p M :𝒜 × 𝒯𝒟 → 𝒫(𝒫( P )) as follows: m a p M ( a ,  t d ) = { m a p ℬℛ ( b r )| b r  ∈  f i l t e r M ( a ,  t d )}

The additional constraints included by binding information may cause undesirable side effects if there is no person in the organisational model that meets all the constraints. This could happen, for instance, if we set as additional constraint for the clerk that is responsible for activity Prepare authorisation in the running example that she has the capability of speaking English and it turns out that there is no clerk with such a capability in the project. The identification of these situations is called consistency checking and it has been studied in detail in the literature (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ). Specifically, a resource assignment, such as the one specified by a RAM BI model, is consistent if it is always possible to find a potential participant for an activity during any execution of the process for any responsibility type that appears in the resource assignment.

Since inconsistencies are caused by the constraints included by binding information specified in a resource assignment language, the ability to check the consistency of a RAM BI model is directly related to the ability to check the consistency of the resource assignment language used in its binding information. This is possible with some resource assignment languages such as RAL (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ). In the next section we introduce RAL and detail how consistency checking can be implemented with it.

5.3. Using RAM BI with RAL

As discussed in the previous sections, a RAM BI model relies on an external resource assignment language to define its binding information. Next, we illustrate how RAM BI can be used with RAL (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ). We have chosen RAL because of its high expressive power, capable of supporting all the creation patterns (Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés 2011 ) and because it has a well-defined semantics that enable the implementation of analysis operations such as consistency checking. However, other resource assignment languages could also be used.

RAL is a modular (DSL) that specifies a set of expressions and constraints to define resource assignment conditions independently of any specific process modelling notation. It is composed of five modules:

  • RAL Core allows defining generic resource assignment expressions based on resource’s characteristics. For instance, it allows assigning an activity to one of two specific resources with the expression (IS Betty) OR (IS Anna) .
  • The occupies relation is supported by PositionConstraint , e.g., HAS POSITION AssistantProfessor.
  • The isMemberOf relation is supported by UnitConstraint , e.g., HAS UNIT InstituteForIB.
  • The participatesIn relation is supported by RoleConstraint , e.g., HAS ROLE Researcher, or HAS ROLE Researcher IN UNIT InstituteForIB.
  • The hasCapability relation is supported by CapabilityConstraint , e.g., HAS CAPABILITY PhDdegree.
  • RAL Data and RAL DataOrg allow selecting individuals, positions, roles or organisational units indicated in a data field of a data object of a process, according to the BPMN (OMG 2011 ) specification of the business process data perspective. 12 For instance, the following expression specifies that the resource allowed to execute an activity is indicated in the data field Applicant of the data object Application : IS PERSON IN DATA FIELD Application.Applicant.
  • RAL AC stands for RAL Access-Control and it extends RAL Core to enable the specification of access-control constraints, such as bod (e.g., IS ANY PERSON responsible for ACTIVITY SubmitPaper) and sod (e.g., NOT(IS ANY PERSON responsible for ACTIVITY FillForm)) .

The use of a specific resource assignment language in a RAM BI model has an impact concerning the type of binding information that can be used in it. Specifically, for RAL it involves the following aspects:

  • RAL has two expressions to select people according to roles, namely: HAS ROLE r and HAS ROLE r IN UNIT u . Therefore, the organisational context that can be given in RAL to an organisational role is always the organisational unit in which the role is played (e.g., the role Coordinator can be played in a department or a project.) Consequently, expression κ refers to an organisational unit and p ( o r ,  c ) can be resolved using RAL expression HAS ROLE or in UNIT c.
  • All previously described RAL resource assignment expressions can be used to add additional constraints to a BoundedRole . This means that all the creation patterns (Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés 2011 ) can be used to select people in RAM BI models. For instance, it is possible to add additional constraints related to the capabilities of the resource usingRAL Org expression HAS CAPABILITY capabilityID or based on the responsibilities it takes in other activities using aRAL AC expression such as IS ANY PERSON responsible for ACTIVITY a .

Figure 3 illustrates in a simplified way the use of the RAM BI metamodel with RAL using as example activity Register at Conference of the scenario described in Section 2 and Table 2 . As depicted in Figure 3(a ), the person with responsibility type Responsible is the researcher who prepared the authorisation request. Hence, there is a bod access-control constraint defined with RAL AC. As for responsibility type Consulted, it is assigned to the coordinator of the project that funds the trip to the conference, indicated in the data object Authorisation form . Therefore, the organisational context is defined with aRAL DataOrg expression.

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RAM-BI models and RAL expressions for activity Prepare Authorisation.

Finally, the well-defined semantics of RAL enables the implementation of several analysis operations such as consistency checking (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ). Therefore, to check the consistency of a RAM BI model that uses RAL as its language for binding information, we just need to translate a RAM BI model into a RAL expressions and then leverage the consistency checking operation that has been implemented for RAL . This translation can be easily done using RAL expressions HAS ROLE or for the case when o c ( b ) and a r ( b ) are undefined, HAS ROLE or IN UNIT u for the case when o c ( b ) is defined and the operator AND to compose expressions for the case when a r ( b ) is defined. The result is function m a p B R R A L : B R → R A L E x p r that can be defined as follows:

Finally, o r M a p M R A L and a n d M a p M R A L , both can be straightforwardly defined by joining the RAL expressions obtained by m a p B R R A L for each bound role defined for the same task duty and the same activity with OR and AND, respectively.

6. RAM2BPMN : using RAM BI with BPMN models

RAM2BPMN is our approach to enable current BPMS to execute BPMN processes in which people with different responsibilities collaborate to complete process activities. An overview of RAM2BPMN is depicted in Figure 4 . The core idea is to take a BPMN model without resource-related information and a RAM BI model as inputs and to automatically generate a new BPMN model in which the only responsibility defined for each activity is Responsible, but which includes new activities to model the semantics conveyed by the other responsibilities included in the RAM BI model. More specifically, RAM2BPMN turns every activity for which some type of responsibility different than Responsible is defined into a subprocess. We refer to the subprocesses created during the transformation as RAM subprocesses . A RAMs subprocess is a regular BPMN subprocess that includes the specific tasks for all the responsibilities that people may have during the execution of the activity of the original process. RAMs subprocesses are created from collaboration templates . A collaboration template specifies how people with different responsibilities interact with each other to carry out an activity of a process. The collaboration template used is chosen at design-time amongst a library of templates depending on the specific requirements of the activity.

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Overview of RAM2BPMN.

We have opted for this approach for several reasons. First, because it ensures that RAM2BPMN can generate models for any BPMS because the generated model only relies on defining the resource responsible for each activity, which is the only responsibility supported in BPMN by default. Second, because the additional complexity that results from including the information about different responsibilities is found only inside the RAMs subprocesses and hence, it does not affect the overall understandability of the initial process. Furthermore, the only difference between the resulting model and the initial one from the visualisation standpoint is that tasks are transformed into collapsed subprocesses.

Figure 5 depicts an example of template 13 that models the interaction of the RASCI responsibilities as it was introduced in Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés ( 2011b ). This interaction establishes that the approval action (Accountable) takes place after the completion of the work developed for the activity (Responsible), and only then the notification action (Informed) can be performed. There is also a loop to redo the work in case it does not get the approval by the resource with the responsibility Accountable. Actions of responsibility Consulted and responsibility Support are considered to take place in parallel with the task performed by the resource with responsibility Responsible. Finally, the template includes two decision activities performed by the resource with responsibility Responsible to decide whether support or consultation are required. The template also has some placeholders that have to be filled with information that comes from the RAM BI model and the definition of the activity in the BPMN model.

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Example of a template that models the interaction of RASCI responsibilities as it was introduced in in Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés ( 2011b ).

Another relevant aspect is that not all possible RAM BI models can be used with the template depicted in Figure 5 . In particular, it requires that there is exactly one bound role for responsibility responsible and at most one bound role for responsibility accountable for each activity, whereas there can be any number of bound roles for the other responsibilities. In general, each template may require a specific cardinality for the responsibilities of a RAM BI model.

The procedure that creates a RAM subprocess from a template for a specific activity of the process is the instantiation of a template . This procedure uses the information of the RAM BI and the BPMN models to fill the placeholders of the template with activity-specific information and to compose the RAMs subprocess, when necessary. For instance, Figure 6 depicts the result of the instantiation of the template in Figure 5 .

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Example of the instantiation of static template in Figure 5 for activity Register at Conference of the process defined in Figure 1 .

The advantage of using templates is that each organisation may define their own library of templates to specify how people involved in an activity of a process with different responsibilities interact with each other, thus providing flexibility on the way these interactions are carried out. Furthermore, although one template is usually used for all activities of a process or even several processes, it may be the case that for a specific activity (or process) one might be interested in using a different template. For instance, for a time-sensitive activity, one might be interested in a template in which the person accountable for the activity does not only supervise the outcome of the activity but also the completion time. This can be done, e.g., by designing a template in which the task performed by the person responsible for the activity has a timer that triggers a supervision task performed by the person accountable for the activity when a predefined time has passed. Section 7.2 discusses some examples of different templates that can be used with RASCI responsibilities.

The support for different templates for each activity in the process is modelled by means of function t e m p l that links each activity to the template that must be used:

(Assignment of templates to activities) Let A be the set of activities of a process and 𝒯 be the set of all possible templates, function t e m p l : A  → 𝒯 specifies which template is used for each activity of the process.

RAM2BPMN: Including resource assignment information from RAM BI into a BPMN model

1: IN : BPMN; M  = ( 𝒜; 𝒪 R ; ℬ R ;  o c ;  a r ); templ

2: Pre : 𝒜 ⊆ activities of process BPMN

3: Pre : The resource assignment of M is consistent with BPMN

4: Pre : compatible(M; templ)

5: OUT : BPMN’ model with resource information

6: BPMN ’ ← BPMN

7: for all activity a in the business process BPMN do

8:   if anyTD(a) then

9:    T ← templ(a)

10:    subprocess a ← instantiation of template T using BPMN and M

11:   replace in BPMN’ activity a by subprocess a

12:   end if

13: end fo r

14: return BPMN’

Based on the concept of template and its instantiation, the RAM2BPMN algorithm can be formalised as detailed in Algorithm 6. The input is a resource-unaware BPMN model, i.e., a model without resource assignments, ( b p m n ); a RAM BI model ( M ), and a t e m p l function.

The algorithm has three preconditions, namely: the activities of the RAM BI model must be a subset of the activities in the BPMN model (specifically, those that cannot be automated); the resource assignment of M must be consistent with bpmn (cf. Section 5.2 ), and the templates chosen by the t e m p l function must be compatible with the RAM BI model in terms of cardinality (cf. Section 6.1 ).

The algorithm can be outlined as follows. First, the b p m n model is cloned into b p m n ′ (line 6). Then, the following three steps are executed for each activity of the process (line 6) that has a resource assignment in the RAM BI model ( a n y T D ( a ) ) (line 6). First, the template associated to the activity is selected (line 6). Second, the template is instantiated using the resource assignment information provided by the RAM BI model (line 6). Finally, the activity of b p m n ′ is replaced by a subprocess created using the template instantiated in the previous step (line 6). The last step of the algorithm is to return the new b p m n ′ in which activities have been replaced by RAMs subprocesses (line 6.

Next, we delve into the two parts of the algorithm that require more details, namely: the concept of compatibility between RAM BI model and template (line 6), and the definition and instantiation of templates (line 6). The consistency checking has already been discussed in Section 5.2 .

6.1. Cardinality of templates

As discussed before, not all RAM BI models can be used with a specific template because templates may require a specific cardinality for the responsibilities of the RAM BI model (e.g., they may limit the number of people with responsibility Responsible to exactly one). The cardinality of a template is defined with the template together with the specification of the interaction it models, such as the one in Figure 5 , and can be formalised as follows.

(Cardinality of a template) Let T be a template and let 𝒯𝒟 be the set of responsibilities supported by T . The cardinality of each responsibility is defined by means of function c a r d T :𝒯𝒟 → IN 0  × (IN 0 ∪ { n } ) such that c a r d T ( t d ) = ( x ,  y ) means that the template requires at least x bound roles and at most y bound roles for a responsibility t  ∈ 𝒯𝒟 , such that x  ≤  y . If y =  n , then any number of bound roles greater than or equal to x is allowed.

For convenience, for each c a r d T ( t d ) = ( x ,  y ) we define functions m i n T ( t d ) =  x and m a x T ( t d ) =  y to represent the minimum and maximum number of bound roles for a responsibility t  ∈ 𝒯𝒟 .

Based on the cardinality of a template, the compatibility of a template and a RAM BI model for an activity can be defined. Intuitively, a template is compatible with a RAM BI model for an activity A if all responsibilities specified in the RAM BI model for A fulfil the cardinality restrictions specified in the template. This can be formalised as follows:

(Compatibility of a template) Let M = (𝒜, 𝒪ℛ, ℬℛ,  o c ,  a r ) be a RAM BI model , 𝒯𝒟 M be the set of responsibilities used in M , c a r d be the cardinality function of a template T , and 𝒯𝒟 T be the set of responsibilities used in T . The template T is compatible with the RAM BI model M for an activity a  ∈ 𝒜 iff the number of bound roles specified in M related to activity a for each responsibility is within the constraints specified by the cardinality function c a r d :

Finally, equipped with this definition, it is easy to define the compatibility of an assignment of templates to activities ( t e m p l ) with a RAM BI model as follows.

(Compatibility of an assignment of templates) Let M = (𝒜, 𝒪ℛ, ℬℛ,  o c ,  a r ) be a RAM BI model and t e m p l an assignment of templates to activities. The assignment of templates to activities t e m p l is compatible with M if and only if it assigns a template that is compatible with M for each activity in 𝒜 :

6.2. Definition and instantiation of templates

Figure 5 depicts an example of template for RASCI responsibilities. However, this shows just one possible way in which a template can be defined and instantiated. As a matter of fact, the only requirement imposed by the RAM2BPMN algorithm is that the result of the instantiation should be a subprocess configured using information from the BPMN and the RAM BI models. This means that different approaches can be used to define templates and their choice depends on the characteristics of the template that is being modelled as discussed in Section 6.2.3 .

In the remainder of this section, we detail two different approaches for the definition of collaboration templates and discuss their advantages and drawbacks, although other approaches could also be designed. To illustrate them, we use the aforementioned interaction of RASCI responsibilities introduced in Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés ( 2011b ).

6.2.1. Static templates

A static template is a process model defined in BPMN (cf. Figure 5 ) that details the interaction between people with different responsibilities within an activity with just two peculiarities:

  • Placeholders are used in the resource assignments and the names of the activities that will be replaced with values obtained from the RAM BI and/or the BPMN models during instantiation.
  • XOR gateways are included in the process for enabling or disabling the activities specific to a responsibility. To this end, placeholders can also be used in the conditions of the gateways.

The instantiation mechanism of these static templates just involves the replacement of all the placeholders that appear in the template. This is done by iterating over all these placeholders and replacing their value by one obtained from the RAM BI or the BPMN model. Table 5 depicts a list of the placeholders that can be used in the static template and their replacement.

Frequent placeholders and their replacement.

Figure 5 depicts an example of a static template and Figure 6 depicts its instantiation. The template models the interaction of RASCI responsibilities introduced in Cabanillas, Resinas, and Ruiz-Cortés ( 2011b ) and includes gateways to bypass parts of the process in case the responsibility is not assigned for the activity. The template also has placeholders for the name of the activities so that they include the name of the activity for which the RAM subprocess is created, and the resource assignments (expressed using BPMN annotations in the diagram). In particular, activities Provide support, Provide information and Approve activity are assigned to the responsibilities Support, Consulted and Accountable, respectively. The other activities, which include the two decision and the two assessment activities, are performed by the responsibility Responsible. In the latter case, the RAL expression

is used. This allows every element within the subprocess to make reference to the performer of the activity (i.e., the new subprocess), since according to BPMN (OMG 2011 ) the allocation related to a subprocess is made before starting the activities that compose it. Note also that the responsibility Informed is different from the others because it refers to the target of the notification action (i.e., the people that are informed), not to the holder of the responsibility like in the rest of cases. Furthermore, given the definition of the responsibility Informed (cf. Section 3.1.1 ), it is reasonable to consider it an external participant of the process because, independently of her responsibilities with respect to other process activities, for the activity in question she is a target and not an executor. For this reason, the activities that correspond to the responsibility Informed are modelled as send tasks (OMG 2011 ).

6.2.2. Fragment-based templates

Static templates provide a simple yet useful mechanism to define templates. However, more complex mechanisms can be devised. One source of inspiration for these mechanisms are configurable business processes (La Rosa et al. 2011 ). A configurable process model captures a family of related process models in a single artifact. Such models are intended to be configured to fit the requirements of specific organisations or projects, leading to individualised process models (van der Aalst et al. 2010 ). Therefore, templates can be seen as a type of configurable business processes and their instantiation can be seen as a configuration of them (Kumar and Yao 2012 ). Consequently, most approaches for defining and setting up configurable business processes can be adapted for defining collaboration templates.

In particular, fragment-based templates are based on the approach proposed in Kumar and Yao ( 2012 ) for designing flexible process variants using templates and rules. The templates are made up of two different elements that can change from template to template, namely: a set of process fragments, at least one for each responsibility; and a composition algorithm that is used for putting together all those fragments and for enabling or disabling the tasks specific to a responsibility.

Fragments must be subprocess graphs with single entry and single exit nodes (also denoted as hammocks in graph literature (Weber, Reichert, and Rinderle-Ma 2008 )) that represent the tasks that are necessary to carry out a given responsibility. Not only the same placeholders as with static templates but also ad-hoc placeholders can be used in the fragments. The value for these placeholders must be provided by the composition algorithm. Figure 7 depicts an example of fragments that belong to a fragment-based template (more examples can be found in Section 7.2 ). Specifically, five process fragments named R-fragment, A-fragment, S-fragment, C-fragment, and I-fragment are defined, one for each RASCI responsibility. Each of them have their corresponding placeholders in the names of the activities and the resource assignments.

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Example of the fragments defined for each of the RASCI responsibilities in a fragment-based template.

Concerning the composition algorithm, the idea is to combine the accompanying process fragments in a meaningful way based on the information provided by the RAM BI model and the BPMN model. To describe how the process fragments are composed together, we suggest the use of change patterns (Weber, Reichert, and Rinderle-Ma 2008 ). Change patterns and in particular, a type of them called adaptation patterns, allow users to structurally modify a process model using change operations defined in terms of the process model (e.g., adding an activity in parallel to another one) instead of change primitives defined in terms of the underlying graph (e.g., adding a single node, two control flow edges, and the connectors between them) (Weber, Reichert, and Rinderle-Ma 2008 ). A consequence of this is that change operations provide a compact way of defining changes on a process because each change operation involves one or more change primitives (e.g., adding an activity in parallel involves up to seven change primitives). Furthermore, these changes tend to be easier to understand because they are defined in a higher-level way. All these reasons make change operations a suitable language to define these compositions. Table 6 shows a summary of the most frequent change operations.

Frequent change operations for the implementation of fragment-based templates.

Together with change operations, placeholders defined in Table 5 can also be used as variables and functions in the composition algorithm. The placeholders of the process fragments are replaced during the execution of the composition algorithm. This is done by means of function replace , which receives the fragment with placeholders and returns the same fragment with all placeholders replaced with their corresponding value. The values for ad-hoc placeholders must be provided as parameters of function replace .

Algorithm 2 shows an example of composition algorithm of a fragment-based template that composes the fragments defined in Figure 7 . This algorithm is executed as part of the instantiation of the fragment-based template it belongs to, which means that it would be invoked within line 10 of Algorithm 1. The algorithm starts by replacing the placeholders in the fragment for the responsibility Responsible (line 8). Then, if responsibility types support or consulted have been defined in the RAM BI model (lines 5 and 8) it inserts in parallel fragments for the responsibilities Support and Consulted (lines 6 and 9, respectively). Next, if responsibility type accountable has been defined in the RAM BI model (line 11), it inserts sequentially the fragment for the responsibility Accountable (line 12) and embeds the whole process in a loop based on the decision made by the person accountable for the activity, i.e., whether the work is approved or not (line 13). Finally, if responsibility type informed has been defined in the RAM BI model (line 15) it inserts a fragment for the responsibility Informed for each organisational role that must be informed. This is done in several steps. It iterates over all organisational roles with responsibility Informed defined in the RAM BI model for the given activity (line 17). For each of them, it obtains its resource assignment and name (lines 18 and 19) and it inserts in parallel fragments for each of them in a temporal variable i n f o r m F r a g m e n t (lines 20–23). Finally, it inserts sequentially all these parallel fragments contained in i n f o r m F r a g m e n t (line 26). Figure 8 depicts the instantiation obtained after executing the composition algorithm for activity Register at conference according to the RAM BI model depicted in Table 2 .

Example of the composition algorithm of a fragment-based template that support RASCI responsibilities

1: IN : 𝒯𝒟 = { R ;  A ;  S ;  C ;  I } are the RASCI responsibilities supported by this template.

2: IN : R – fragment; S – fragment;C – fragment;A – fragment; I – fragment are the fragments defined in Figure 7 .

3: OUT : composed fragment

4: base ← replace(R-fragment)

5: if hasTD(S) then

6:  base ← insertParallel(base, replace(S-fragment))

8: if hasTD(C) then

9:  base ← insertParallel(base, replace(C-fragment))

11: if hasTD(A) then

12:  base ← insertSequential(base, replace(A-fragment))

13:  base ← embedInLoop(base, not approved, approved)

15: if hasTD(I) then

16:  informFragment ← empty fragment

17:   for all br ∈ filter(I) do

18:    ra ← map M (br)

19:   name ← orM(br)

20:    if informFragment = empty fragment then

21:    informFragment ← replace(I-fragment, ra, name)

22:    else

23:    informFragment ← insertParallel(informFragment, replace(I-fragment, ra, name))

24:    end if

25:   end for

26:  base ← insertSequential(base, informFragment)

28: return base

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Instantiation of the template depicted in Figure 2 for activity Register at Conference.

6.2.3. Discussion

The decision on which template mechanism to use depends on the requirements of the specific scenario in which they are being applied. Fragment-based templates enable reusing fragments in different templates. So, one can have a repository of different fragments for the same responsibility and combine them in different ways with different composition algorithms. In addition, fragment-based templates allow a more flexible definition since the composition algorithm provides a more fine-grained control of the results of the instantiation. For instance, in Figure 8 several inform fragments were added, one for each organisational role with the responsibility Informed in the RAM BI model, which is something that cannot be easily done with static templates. Finally, the subprocess obtained from fragment-based templates tends to be easier to understand since it only includes the responsibilities that have been assigned to the activity.

However, static templates are easier to build since they do not need a composition algorithm and hence, it is not necessary to deal with its implementation. Moreover, in fragment-based templates, it is harder to detect deadlocks or livelocks introduced during the instantiation because the composition algorithm may change the control flow depending on which responsibilities are enabled for the activity at hand. This does not happen in static templates, in which the control flow is the same all the time.

Therefore, the conclusion is that fragment-based templates should be used in cases in which we are interested in building templates that have many commonalities or in cases in which we require a more fine-grained control of the instantiation. Otherwise, static templates are more appealing since that approach avoids the complexity of developing the composition algorithm.

7. Validation

We have validated the feasibility of the approach with a reference implementation, its flexibility with a repository of templates for responsibility modelling on the basis of the RASCI responsibilities, and its applicability by using the approach with a real scenarion from the railway automation domain.

7.1. Implementation

We have developed a reference implementation of the RAM2BPMN algorithm as well as an editor for RAM BI models and a repository of templates. Furthermore, we have also implemented templates according to the modelling alternatives for the RASCI responsibilities described in Section 7.2 . An overview of the architecture designed to support the RAM2BPMN procedure is depicted in Figure 9 . A use case for the whole architecture is described as follows:

  • A template designer builds a set of templates using a template editor and stores them in the template repository.
  • A RAM BI model is defined for each BPMN model whose resource assignment we want to extend. To this end, a process designer uses the RAM BI Model Editor to define the RAM BI for the given BPMN model. Furthermore, she also chooses the template that should be applied to each activity from amongst the templates stored in the template repository.
  • The RAM2BPMN engine uses the RAM BI model, the BPMN model and the templates from the template repository to obtain a BPMN with resource information.
  • The BPMN model obtained in the previous step is deployed into a BPMS for its execution.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is TEIS_A_1390166_F0009_B.jpg

Overview of the architecture implement to support the RAM2BPMN procedure.

The templates used by the architecture can be either static templates or fragment-based templates. Furthermore, the architecture has been designed so that new types of templates could be easily added to the system.

All of the components that make up this architecture have been integrated into Collection of Resource-centrIc Supporting Tools And Languages (CRISTAL) (Cabanillas et al. 2012 ), a tool suite that provides support for the specification and automated analysis of the business process resource perspective. Information about the system can be found at

7.1.1. Templates editor

In our current implementation, there is no dedicated template editor. Instead, a BPMN model editor is used to model the static templates or the process fragments for the fragment-based templates and then, they are manually stored in the templates repository.

7.1.2. Templates repository

The templates repository is a Java library that stores the templates that have been designed for the organisation. Each template is composed of a template description file, which details the name of the template and its cardinality (cf. Section 6 ), and a set of companion files that are specific of each type of template. For instance, in a static template there is only one companion file, which is the BPMN model of the template; and in a fragment-based template there is one companion file for each process fragment and another one for describing the composition algorithm. The current implementation of the templates repository relies on a file-based storage for both template descriptions and companion files.

7.1.3. RAM BI model editor

It is a Web application developed in Java that allows the user to define the resource information associated with the activities of a BPMN model by filling in a RASCI matrix (Website 2014 ) and optionally adding binding information with RAL (Cabanillas et al. 2015b ), as shown in Figure 10 . This editor also allows the user to specify the template that should be used for each activity in the process, i.e., function t e m p l . Both the RAM BI model and the function t e m p l are serialised into the JSON file format.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is TEIS_A_1390166_F0010_OC.jpg

Screenshot of the RAM BI Model Editor.

7.1.4. RAM2BPMN engine

The RAM2BPMN Engine implements the RAM2BPMN algorithm (cf. Algorithm 1). Specifically, it receives an XML file with the representation of a (resource-unaware) BPMN model, a JSON file with the RAM BI model and the function t e m p l , as well as a templates repository; and it returns the XML representation of the BPMN model with the RASCI information embedded in it. This functionality can be invoked from the user interface of the RAM BI Editor (cf. Figure 10 ) or from the command line.

The RAM2BPMN Engine supports the two types of templates described in Section 6 . Furthermore, the engine has been designed to allow new types of templates provided that the corresponding instantiation mechanism is integrated into the engine.

The resulting BPMN model generated is standard BPMN . Therefore, it can be manipulated in any process modelling tool and executed in a BPMN -compliant BPMS that has the required support for the resource assignment language used in the RAM BI model .

7.2. Modelling alternatives for RASCI responsibilities

One of the main advantages of our approach is that it does not enforce any specific behaviour for the people with different responsibilities that work together on an activity, but it allows the organisation to model the interaction that best suits its requirements. Furthermore, a library of templates can be created by the organisation so that they can be reused in different processes.

In the following we validate this flexibility by modelling alternatives that can be considered for RASCI responsibilities. We focus on RASCI responsibilities because they are a well-known responsibility set used in many different domains. The modelling alternatives are obtained from our experience in different projects in which RASCI responsibilities have been modelled as well as from patterns identified in both the industry (Effektif 2016 ; OASIS 2010 ) and the related research literature (Brambilla, Fraternali, and Vaca 2011 ; Barchetti et al. 2012 ). Because the requirements of each organisation may lead to different alternatives, this is by no means a complete catalogue, but rather an illustration of the wide variety of possibilities that our approach enables.

To avoid confusion, in this section we use activity to refer to the activity of the original business process for which a RAMs subprocess shall be created and we use task to refer to each of the activities that are part of the RAMs subprocess. The modelling alternatives are introduced using BPMN 2.0 modelling concepts (OMG 2011 ).

7.2.1. Responsible

This responsibility represents the execution of the activity itself and the coordination of other responsibilities involved in the execution of the activity such as Support, Consult or Informed. Therefore, the modelling alternatives for this responsibility come from the role it plays in the interaction with the other ones. Since these alternatives are also related to the other responsibilities, they are described in the section that discusses the respective modelling alternatives.

7.2.2. Accountable

The modelling alternatives of this responsibility are based on whether the accountability refers to the quality of the work performed or it also refers to the fact that the work is finished in a timely manner. The former is the typical interpretation of accountability whereas the latter is useful for time-sensitive activities.

If accountability refers to the quality of the work performed, it usually involves an explicit approval of the work previously performed by the person responsible for the activity. This implies adding a task for that purpose in the template. If the work is not approved, then a loop is in place so that the person responsible for the activity has to do it again. An example of this can be found in the task Approve Activity  <  activityName  >  of the template of Figure 5 . This behaviour has been identified as the Document Approval pattern in Effektif ( 2016 )

If accountability refers to making sure the work is finished in time, it involves the inclusion of a trigger in the process that notifies the person accountable for the activity that it has not been completed in a predefined amount of time. From a modelling perspective, this involves adding a time-based non-interrupting boundary event to the task performed by the person responsible for the activity such that if a certain time has passed and the task has not been completed, the person allocated to the responsibility Accountable is notified. This behaviour has been identified as the Timed Escalation pattern in Effektif ( 2016 ) and it is also the way accountability is dealt used in OASIS ( 2010 ).

Both alternatives are not exclusive and can be used together in the same template.

7.2.3. Support and consulted

The responsibilities Support and Consulted share some modelling alternatives because they have a very similar nature. Both of them involve a person to collaborate with the person responsible for the activity in its execution, being their degree of involvement in it the only difference between them. There is a wide variety of modelling alternatives for these two responsibilities based on several characteristics of the interaction, namely:

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Object name is TEIS_A_1390166_F0011_OC.jpg

Template fragment that shows a modelling example for consult responsibility modelled as mandatory, done after some work, batches, group-based, system decided and not assessed.

  • The moment in which support or consultation takes place . There are two options: it can be done in parallel to the main task, or it can be done after some initial work is done. From a modelling perspective, the former case can be modelled as in Figure 5 in which support and consultation tasks are performed in parallel with task Perform activity . The latter case usually involves three stages: a first stage in which the person responsible for the activity performs a preliminary task; a second stage in which support or consultation is required; and a third stage in which the person responsible for the activity merges the contributions received. This general scheme is followed by several patterns identified in the literature. For instance, in the Collaborative Editing pattern described in Barchetti et al. ( 2012 ), the person responsible for the activity first creates a draft and then this draft receives contributions from all the people with the Support responsibility for the activity. Finally, the person responsible for the activity collects all contributions and finishes the activity. The same pattern but for the Consulted responsibility is described in Effektif 2016 ) as the Multiple Stakeholder Input pattern. This is the pattern depicted in Figure 11 .

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Object name is TEIS_A_1390166_F0012_OC.jpg

Template fragment that shows a modelling example for support responsibility modelled as optional, done in parallel, anytime, group-based, responsible decided and assessed.

  • The number of people that can provide support or be consulted . In this case, the support or consultation can be asked to one person at a time or to a group of people at the same time. Modelling the former is straightforward and an example is depicted in Figure 5 . The latter can be modelled using either several parallel tasks or a multi-instance task. Using several parallel tasks is more appropriate if we want to control exactly how many people can provide support or consultation in parallel. It is also useful to have a higher degree of control concerning who decides who takes the responsibility (see next characteristic). Instead, if we are interested in providing freedom of choice at run time, multi-instance tasks are more convenient because all their parametrisation in terms of the number of parallel instances and conditions for cancellation are defined using run-time process data. Figures 11 and 12 depict this alternative.
  • The decision on who performs the Support or Consulted responsibility . A RASCI matrix defines a set of candidates to provide support or consultation for a given activity. However, it does not mean that all of them have to provide it. Someone has to choose the specific people that shall be allocated to the responsibility. There are typically two options to do so: either the person responsible for the activity explicitly chooses the specific people from amongst all candidates, or the choice is done following the mechanisms provided by the BPMS. The former option requires having a task performed by the person responsible for the activity in which she chooses the people she wants for support or consultation. This choice is stored in a data object that is used to assign these people to the tasks that represent the support or consultation by means of RAL expression IS PERSON IN DATA FIELD x. An example is depicted in Figure 12 . This behaviour has been identified as the Required Role Assignment pattern in Effektif ( 2016 ). The latter option just requires using the RAL expression of the RASCI matrix assignment of the responsibility for the activity in the task that represents the responsibility. This is the way it is done in the template of Figures 5 and 11 .
  • The explicit assessment of support or consultation . If support or consultation is explicitly assessed, then a task performed by the person responsible for the activity should be added after the task that represents the support or consultation. An example of this is depicted in Figures 5 and 12 by means of task Assess support for  <  activityName  >  .

In addition to the aforementioned characteristics, it is also possible to model the support tasks in a more structured manner. For instance, one may create a template in which the support follows a divide-and-conquer approach. In this case, the person responsible for the activity may decompose the work to be done in small work items and assign each of them to people that provide support to the activity. After all the contributions have finished, the person responsible for the activity can merge all the work items into a final result. This pattern is typically used in crowdsourcing scenarios (Kittur et al. 2011 ).

7.2.4. Informed

This responsibility is modelled as a task that notifies the people that have to be informed about the state of the activity. Its modelling alternatives are based on the following characteristics of the interaction and a version of them are also present in the support WS-HumanTask (OASIS 2010 ) provides to responsibility informed:

  • The moment at which people are informed . The most typical behaviour is that people are notified at the end of the activity, i.e., after it has been performed and approved. This is how it is done in the example of Figure 5 . However, other moments for notification can be included in the template, such as when the work related to the activity has been performed and it is waiting for approval. One may also want to notify the state of the activity after a certain amount of time has passed. This can be modelled by attaching a notification task to a time-based non-interrupting boundary event placed in the task representing responsibility Responsible. Note that all these alternatives are not mutually exclusive and hence, they can be used altogether in the template.
  • The person in charge of informing . The Informed responsibility is peculiar in the sense that the people assigned in the RASCI matrix are not the ones who perform the activity, but those who receive the notification. This means that someone has to perform the action of informing. One option is that the notification is sent automatically by the BPMS, e.g., as an email. If, on the contrary, the notification has to be sent by a person, that person might be either the person responsible for the activity or a person that provides support for the activity, since sending notifications can be seen as a supportive task.
  • The way notifications are realised . The how is usually domain-specific and may cover a wide set of options that range from an email to a web service invocation or a telephone call, among others. Furthermore, how people are informed is strongly related to who performs the notification because some notification mechanisms are easier to automate than others. For instance, a notification that involves sending an email or an SMS is easier to automate than making a phone call.

7.3. Use case

We have applied our approch to a real scenario from industry in the railway automation domain, specifically to the process for releasing a new engineering system for a railway customer. The BPMN model of the process is depicted in Figure 13 .

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An engineering process in the railway domain.

The process starts when a new agreement with a client has been signed by the project management team. A new repository is then created for the customer data by a technician and, at the same time, possible additional data are requested from the client by the engineer project manager. The next step is the actual engineering of the system, a subprocess in which the new system is built. It thus involves a large variety of resources and data coming from different data sources. The engineering project manager orchestrates and monitors the engineering tasks. Once the system is built, it must be tested before it is released for its use. That procedure takes place in a laboratory and comprises two steps: the test setup and the test execution. Prior to that, the testing project manager has to check whether the lab spaces needed must be set up for the test. Specific information about the lab settings and the system developed might be required in order to make such a decision. The employees of the organisation involved in the test setup and run steps are specialised in the execution of specific testing phases for specific types of systems, i.e., there may be an engineer who can perform the setup for a system S 1 and the test execution for a system S 2 , another engineer who cannot be involved in the testing of system S 1 but can perform both activities for the system S 2 , and so on. The setup tasks usually require one lab assistant working on one unit for a specific type of hardware in the laboratory; and the run activity usually requires several employees for its execution, in particular, one engineer who is responsible for conducting the tests and one lab assistant who provides support. When the testing of the system is finished, the testing project manager is notified, as they account for this activity. They then check the results of the test. If the results are not satisfactory, the system must be re-engineered. Otherwise, the testing project manager writes a final report that is archived together with the information generated containing the description of the test cases, test data, test results, and the outline of the findings. Information from the engineers involved in the building of the system may be necessary for writing such a report. Once ready, the engineer project manager is informed and proceeds to deploy an already complete and tested version of the engineering system, most likely helped by an engineer. The system integration team will later undertake the installation of the product, which constitutes a different process.

Table 7 shows the RASCI matrix of the process excluding the two subprocesses and Figure 14 illustrates a template that models the interaction of RASCI responsibilities for activity Run test . The template is done by composing template fragments for the responsibilities involved. Note that the alternatives described in Section 7.2 must be considered for this purpose. In particular, regarding support, it is optional for the activity and, in case it is required, it can be requested at any time and will be carried out in parallel with the rest of the execution performed by the person responsible for the activity, i.e., the engineer in charge. Only one lab assistant supports the engineer in running the test. Assessment by the engineer is not necessary as the work will later be checked for approval. In order for that to happen, the testing project manager is informed about the completion of the work and proceeds to check the outcome, hence following the Document Approval pattern.

RASCI matrix for the engineering system release process.

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Object name is TEIS_A_1390166_F0014_OC.jpg

Composition of template fragments for activity Run Test.

8. Discussion

From the analysis of the research literature and the current approach followed in industry to responsibility management in business processes, it becomes apparent that there is an increasing demand and support for modelling activities that involve several people with different responsibilities. However, as far as process automation is concerned, the only responsibility that is managed during process execution in most proposals is the one related to carrying out the work required for the completion of the activity. Moreover, in the few cases that they support other types of responsibilities, this support is very limited in terms of generalisability and flexibility as discussed in Section 4 . This is a problem because the other responsibilities have to be implemented by manually adding activities for them in the executable process model, which is a time-consuming and error-prone task, specially for processes with a large number of activities or frequent changes in the resource assignment.

This paper introduces two novel artefacts, namely the RAM BI metamodel and the RAM2BPMN algorithm that contribute to improve the existing support for responsibility management in executable business processes in order to alleviate the aforementioned problem. Specifically, these two artefacts together enable the execution, in current BPMN engines, of business processes in which several people participate in the same activity with different responsibilities. This is done thanks to RAM2BPMN that automatically extends business process models to include in them the information about the people with different responsibilities that are specified in a RAM BI model. This extension is done leveraging templates that can be defined by the user and specify how the interaction between the people with different responsibilities must be carried out. Although the use of templates to transform BPMN models has been done elsewhere, this approach is the first time in which templates have been used to deal with the organisational perspective of business processes. Specifically, by using them, our approach fulfils the two goals defined in Section 4 , which are not supported by any of the proposals analysed in Section 3 , namely:

  • It is generic in terms of the types of responsibilities that can be used in it because it does not impose a predefined set of responsibilities, but it can use the most convenient set for each situation.
  • It is flexible in the sense that the interaction between the people that collaborate in an activity with different responsibilities is not predefined, but can be adapted to specific scenarios. Furthermore, our proposal enables the creation of libraries of templates that allows reusing different interaction patterns across activities, processes, and even organisations.

Furthermore, the way RAM2BPMN is designed provides the following additional advantages:

  • It is platform independent in the sense that the models obtained can be used by any BPMS that supports BPMN .
  • It is transparent in the sense that, although it transforms the original process model into a new one, the new elements are always embedded into subprocesses, which means that the original structure of the process model is unaltered. This is an advantage for the monitoring of the process and the understandability of audit logs because, although the information provided by the BPMS refers to the extended process instead of the original one, since the process structure is unaltered, it is straightforward to translate the information to the original process.

It is also remarkable that although we use BPMN as the process modelling language, the same ideas can be applied to other process modelling languages by adapting the details of the approaches described in this paper to their features. Similarly, where we use RAL one could use another language for defining resource assignments. In this case, the overall expressiveness would be that of the resource assignment language used.

However, our proposal has two main limitations. First, in the current approach, the template has to deal with the errors that occur during the process, e.g. a person that should be informed is not informed because the email server does not work. Although this is enough for most cases, it limits the ability to reuse error recovery strategies in different templates. One possible solution could be to extend RAM2BPMN so that the designer can specify which recovery strategy must be use in each activity independently of the template chosen. Second, since we are using RAL to define the resource assignments, mechanisms to process RAL expressions are necessary in order to be able to automatically calculate the potential holders of the responsibilities at run time; however, this support can be easily integrated into BPMS, as described in Cabanillas et al. ( 2015b ).

9. Conclusions and future work

In this paper we have presented an approach to extend the existing support for responsibility management in business processes. This approach is based on a metamodel and a technique to enable the execution, in current BPMN engines, of business processes in which several people participate in the same activity with different responsibilities. A prototype of the approach has been implemented, and it has been evaluated by modelling existing interaction patterns between people that collaborate in an activity with different responsibilities and by applying it to two real scenarios.

From this work we conclude that the existing support for responsibility management can be improved in several directions. On the one hand, our proposal of RAM BI models shows how modelling responsibility assignments can be decoupled from process models unlike what is usually done in languages such as BPMN that put together the information concerning control flow and human resources. This enables a separation of concerns between process behaviour and resource assignment, which provides a better visualisation of the information concerning resource assignment. This is especially useful when modelling complex processes or when the designs of the control flow and the resource assignments are done by different persons.

On the other hand, this work shows that it is possible to create a library templates that model different interactions patterns between people that participate in the same activity with different responsibilities. What is interesting is that these templates are reused across different activities and even different processes. This encourages a new research line focused on identifying these interaction patterns and determining in which situation they are useful. Some preliminary work already exists coming from industry (Effektif 2016 ) and academy (Brambilla, Fraternali, and Vaca 2011 ; Barchetti et al. 2012 ).

As next steps, we plan to explore additional use cases together with industry. In particular, we are interested in coming up with a set of interaction patterns that can be found in different cases and to define them using a similar approach to the design patterns in software engineering (Gamma et al. 1993 ). In addition, we also plan to extend our prototype implementation to integrate it into an open source BPMS such as Camunda. 14 Specifically the idea is to integrate the implementation as a plugin so that a model is transformed right after being deployed in the BPMS in a way that is transparent to the user. We think that this would contribute to the dissemination of the tool and its integration by startups or third party companies.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund [V 569-N31]; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) [845638]; European Union’s H2020 Programme [645751]; Spanish R&D&I Programme [TIN2015–70560]; Andalusian R&D&I Programme [P12–TIC-1867].

1. Please notice that the values for roles and persons are fictitious.

2. In BPMN a process takes place within a single pool. Diagrams with two or more pools, in which messages between the pools are exchanged, are called collaborations.

3. http://www.sixsigmaonline.org/six-sigma-training-certification-information/articles/the-efficient-use-of-a-six-sigma-raci-matrix.html .

4. http://en.it-processmaps.com/products/itil-raci-matrix.html .

5. For the sake of simplicity, the organisational roles that are not involved have been omitted.

6. http://www.visual-paradigm.com/tutorials/racichart.jsp .

7. http://academic.signavio.com/help/en/responsibility_assignment_acco.htm .

8. http://www.bizagi.com/ .

9. http://www.jboss.org/products/bpmsuite/overview/ .

10. https://camunda.com/ .

11. http://www.bonitasoft.com/ .

12. A Business Process can have a set of Data Objects , which can contain one or more Data Fields , whose value may change throughout process execution.

13. From now on, when we use the term template , we refer to collaboration templates .

14. http://camunda.org .

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Project.co

Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RACI Matrix) Explained

There’s an old saying that ‘If everyone’s responsible, nobody’s responsible.’ And in project management, it often rings true.

When people don’t know exactly what they – and their colleagues – are responsible for, it’s easy for things to get missed, ignored, or left for others to deal with.

This is especially true nowadays, with projects more complex – and teams more distributed – than ever.

And it’s a situation that leads to confusion, frustration, and, potentially, project failure.

One way to mitigate this is the responsibility assignment matrix – sometimes called the RACI matrix.

In this post we’ll outline the core principles of the RACI Matrix – and explain why it may be a good idea for project managers to put in place for their projects!

Article Contents

What is an RACI matrix?

A RACI matrix is an essential project management tool used to define roles and responsibilities for a project or project task. It’s about defining who’s responsible for projects or tasks, and what level of input is expected of them.

The acronym ‘RACI’ stands for Responsible , Accountable , Consulted, Informed. These are the four categories of involvement in a project, and each individual or team involved in the project is assigned one of these project roles. 

Let’s first dig into what they mean…

Responsible

The Responsible category is for a person or team who is actively involved in completing a task or project. To put it crudely – they’re the ones who are actually ‘doing the work.’

Accountable

The Accountable category is for the person or team who’s ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the project, task or deliverable. They might not be the ones ‘doing’ the work, but they are the ones who are ultimately accountable for the outcome. 

Consulted

The Consulted category is for teams or people who need to be consulted for their expertise or input along the way. They may not be directly involved in the work, but their input is important. For example – these people might be required to give feedback and sign off, or provide technical advice.

Informed

And the Informed category is for people who need to be kept informed of progress. They may provide input on a task or project, but more likely, they just require up-to-date info to understand where things are up to.

By clearly defining roles and responsibilities for a project using a RACI matrix, it’s easier to monitor progress and ensure successful completion. 

It also helps to eliminate misunderstandings about who is responsible for what by enshrining this in a clear, visual way.

How to create an RACI matrix

Creating a RACI matrix is easy to do, and there are several templates available online that can be used as a starting point. 

The matrix consists of two main elements – a table and a list of tasks, roles and responsibilities for the project or task.

The table is made up of columns for each individual involved in the project, and rows for each task or activity that needs to be completed. Each cell in the table will indicate the role for that person in relation to that particular task. The list should include a description of each task or activity, as well as the roles and responsibilities for each individual involved.

Let’s look at a classic project and consider how those categories would come into effect using the RACI model.

In this example we’ll consider a typical, run-of-the-mill web design project. So we start by adding a column for every person or team involved – we’ll go with client, project manager, web designer, graphic designer, front-end developer, back-end developer, content writers/editors/strategists and a QA team.

Then, down the left-hand column, we list the stages or tasks involved in that project. We’ll keep things broad and go with briefing and project outline, design, look and feel, user experience, front-end user interface, back end functionality and website content

Again, this is pretty broad, but you could also make it incredibly granular, highlighting every single task and every single person – and, actually, the RACI matrix is often at its best when done in this more detailed way.

Then, to complete our RACI matrix, we need to go through each empty box in our chart and fill it out with one of our four letters to denote whether that person or team is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted or Informed.

RACI matrix example

To further illustrate the idea, let’s look at a different example – designing and executing a content marketing strategy.

In this example you’ll notice that we have some individuals marked as “A&R” – this means they’re both accountable AND responsible. In other words, they’re tasked with doing the work – AND accountable for the results – which demonstrates how, sometimes, people can occupy more than one category in the matrix.

RACI matrix example

The beauty of this model is that you can read it in a couple of different ways.

You can view it row by row and work out who has what level of responsibility for a particular task.

Or you can use the columns to work out the requirements of a person or team across a whole project. In theory, you could pick out your role, then get a clear overview of all your responsibilities by simply working your way down the list.

Your RACI Matrix x Project.co

RACI charts are a key part of the project management process – particularly for complex projects – and can be managed with project management software like Project.co. 

Start by creating your project. Every project can be customised to include the tools you need.

assignment of responsibility meaning

Next, invite your project team – this can be made up of internal team members, client team members, and even freelancers.

assignment of responsibility meaning

The Project Notes section is a great place to leave important info that’s relevant to the whole project. This is a good place to store your RACI matrix. 

Project.co RACI matrix

You can also use the Embed tool to embed documents such as Google Sheets so they’re available from within your project to everyone involved.

Project.co embed tool

You can also include important RACI chart info from within the notes section of each task, as well as attaching tasks to individual people, dates and other important info.. 

Simply create the tasks you need to complete for your project and assign the responsible person or people to them. 

assignment of responsibility meaning

Thanks for reading!

You don’t have to be a business analyst to create a RACI chart and use this powerful method to make your projects more streamlined, simple and efficient.

The bottom line is that a RACI matrix ensures every team member knows what’s expected of them – who’s accountable, who’s doing the work, who needs to be consulted, and who needs to be kept up to date.

And if you’re looking to take your project management game to the next level – sign up to Project.co today and get started for free!

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RACI: how a Responsibility Matrix can help you Manage your Projects

Table of contents, what is the role and responsibility of the matrix, how to use the raci matrix, why is a responsibility matrix important, an example of a raci matrix, raci matrix template: example to download, #1. create a list of project tasks, #2. identify the project participants and assign the roles, #3. designate an agent and a manager for each task or activity, #4. make sure that there is only one person per task, #5. talk to all agents, managers, and stakeholders, #6. use it throughout the duration of the project, our best tips on the raci matrix.

To meet the various challenges of project management, the responsibility matrix , also called the RACI chart , is proving to be an indispensable governance tool for companies.

The success of your projects depends on good project management and a clear vision of the responsibilities of the people assigned . Each manager, and especially the project manager , should define an overview of the roles in order to optimize the distribution of tasks to the team members and avoid wasting time.

How to implement it and effectively extend its possibilities in an agile model?

The responsibility matrix: definition and management principles

This method is an organizational design tool that maps activities and defines the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders by:

  • visually synthesizing " who does what ",
  • setting the perimeter of the project,
  • defining the field of action in order to structure it.

What does RACI stand for?

  • Responsible,
  • Accountable,

This organizational matrix is used in the form of a resource allocation table , which indicates the distribution of functions and responsibilities among the different actors in a project using the letters R, A, C, and I:

  • the "R" for the director or the person in charge of the action ensuring the smooth running of the work;
  • the "A" for the actor who assumes, approves, and possibly carries out the action if it is affixed the two letters R and A;
  • the "C" for the subject matter experts to be consulted for their opinion;
  • the "I" for the agents who will be informed of the progress of the actions without necessarily acting directly.

💡In some specific cases, the letters V and S can be added to the RACI model, each designating respectively:

  • the validator , for certain quality validations,
  • the support , person, or authority that can intervene in support.

This method avoids any project governance problems , such as role redundancy and dilution of responsibilities. It enables a correct and thorough completion of the project .

All the tasks and their assignments are identified, as well as the need for intervention and information at each stage of the process for good steering of the objectives.

This overall vision also allows:

  • to ensure a follow-up of the deliverables ,
  • to avoid any oblivion or dispersion,
  • to easily set up a reminder system that is indispensable in team management.

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Before seeing in detail how to build and fill out a RACI table, we invite you to download our RACI matrix template so that you can fill it out:

Excel Model for RACI matrix

How to build a RACI matrix in 6 steps?

To build a RACI matrix , it is, therefore, necessary to list:

  • inlines, the different tasks and activities attached to the project;
  • and in columns, all the individual actors or multiple entities.

At each intersection of the tool, one or more letters of the RACI system are then assigned, each designating a specific role.

Think about who is involved. This underscores the first decision in creating a RACI: do you list roles or specific people? As a general rule, you should put the functional positions at the top of the list.

Work breakdown structure is very important. Review the project and divide it into clear tasks and deliverables. Record them in the left-hand column of your diagram. It doesn't have to be 100% order, but you should let participants clarify the order of tasks . This has two advantages:

  • First, by establishing order, you will identify missing (or redundant) activities . Participants will notice if something was left out or if two activities may have meant the same thing.
  • Second, this will initiate discussion around interfaces and collaboration . I.e., the process participants exchange ideas in the sense of "I do this and need you to do this but...".

At the end of this phase, the order of the tasks in the process is correct, the list is complete and without redundancies.

To make it easier, ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who does it (Responsible)?
  • Who is responsible for the proper execution or controls the result (Accountable)?
  • Who supports the role of the executor with advice and action (Consulted)?
  • Who is informed by the executor (Informed)?

Each task or deliverable should have one person responsible and one person in charge.

Make sure there is only one role or name assigned to the responsible person - this is really important. Think carefully about who should be consulted while the task is in progress and who should be informed when the task is complete.

Make sure that everyone understands their tasks and roles!

This is important - align all the assumptions you have made with your team, don't do it alone. Get the community together! If you haven't gone over roles with your project team , have a quick chat about how you set up the RACI. Make sure everyone is comfortable with their roles and responsibilities in the project.

One of the most important things is to agree on the RACI matrix that you have created with project stakeholders before starting.

When you implement a task or deliverable, refer back to the RACI and make sure you know who is responsible for what .

Make sure that what was established at the beginning of a project, the roles, and responsibilities towards tasks, are still correct. A good way to do this is to provide a version online , using Google Docs or a project management tool like monday.com .

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  • There should be exactly one person responsible (R) in each row. If more than one person is responsible, much of the clear assignment of responsibility is lost. If no one is responsible - then it is even worse.
  • If more than one responsible person (R) has been assigned per row, after all, you should think about splitting the task.
  • If a column (role) has too many A's and R's, it is a potential bottleneck. Here it should be checked if there is too much responsibility on this role.
  • If a role contains hardly any assignments, you can think about whether it needs to be included at all.

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assignment of responsibility meaning

ELECTORAL FRAMEWORK

Electoral participation, electoral management, electoral integrity, electoral operations, assignment of responsibilities.

In developing voting operations work plans, it is important that:

• each required task is identified;

• the time frames within which each task must be completed is specified;

• dependencies and relationships among the various tasks are clearly shown;

• specific persons or teams are assigned responsibility for each component task.

A clear assignment of responsibilities allows for effective monitoring of performance and prevents the break down of accountability mechanisms. In the pressured environment of voting operations it is easy for seemingly low level, yet critical, tasks to be forgotten.

Clearly identify individuals responsible for tasks and ensure that they know that they have responsibility for their completion. Many voting operations tasks also have an accompanying legal responsibility for their correct completion.

It is critical that those assigned responsibility for tasks are made fully aware of both their own responsibilities and how these inter-relate with other voting operations activities. Providing staff with the appropriate legislation, regulations, and rules, and manuals and checklists for all activities will assist with this.

Focussing on the personal and positive aspect to responsibility assignment can enhance performance. Identifying and promoting individual accountabilities can raise staff self-fulfilment and lead to enhanced performance.

Task Assignment and Electoral Management Body Structure

The actual pattern of responsibility assignment depends on the electoral management body's administrative structure and any legally defined accountability.

Too many responsibilities assigned to centralised levels of authority wastes available expertise and limits its further development in any local or field offices. There is a need to ensure that staff that should be ensuring overall supply, quality, consistency, and integrity are not overloaded with distracting operational tasks at local levels.

Voting is a localised function. Materials development and production, standards, procedures and quality control are generally more consistent and effective where centrally driven. Local functions--such as voting staff recruitment and training delivery, voting location determination, local logistics--can generally be more effectively conducted if responsibilities for their implementation are at the regional or local level.

Maintain Accountability for Service Provision

Many functions included in voting operations work plans will require contributions from different areas of the electoral management body and/or liaison between the electoral management body and other organisations. Where such liaison is required, work plans must identify the operational staff within the electoral management body with the accountability for task completion and the liaison structures that will be in place.

Even where voting operations functions are contracted to other organisations, it is vital that accountabilities for ensuring these tasks are completed correctly and are still assigned to specific persons within the electoral management body. These accountabilities should carry with them the task of implementing quality control measures  to ensure that the products or services are provided at least to the standard required under contract.

Task Assignment in Voting Stations

At the voting station level developing work plans that assign specific task responsibilities to particular staff can both increase the efficiency of training and assist in voter service, while maintaining some flexibility.

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Authority and Responsibility in Management

assignment of responsibility meaning

Everything you need to know about authority and responsibility in management.

Authority means a formal, institutional or legal power in a particular job, function or position that empowers the holder of that job, function or position to successfully perform his task.

Responsibility is the obligation of a subordinate to perform a duty, which has been assigned to him by his superior.

This shows that the obligation is the essence of responsibility. In view of organizational set up, the superior-subordinate relationship gives rise to this responsibility as the superior is vested with the authority to get the specified work done by his subordinates.

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According to Barnard,

“Authority is the character of a communication (order) in a formal organization, by virtue of which it is accepted by a contributor to, or member of, the organization as governing the action he contributes; that is, as governing or determining what he does or not do, so far as the orga­nization is concerned.”

According to Koontz and O’Donnell,

“Viewed internally with respect to the enterprise, responsibility may be defined as the obligation of a subordinate, to whom a superior has assigned a duty to perform a service required. The essence of responsibility is then, obligation.”

Learn about the meaning, definition, concept, relationship of authority and responsibility in management.

Authority and Responsibility in Management – Meaning, Definition, Concept, Characteristics and Relationship

Authority and responsibility in management – meaning, definition and characteristics of authority and responsibility in management.

Meaning of ‘Authority’ :

Definitions of Authority :

According to Barnard, “Authority is the character of a communication (order) in a formal organization, by virtue of which it is accepted by a contributor to, or member of, the organization as governing the action he contributes; that is, as governing or determining what he does or not do, so far as the orga­nization is concerned.”

As Simon puts it, authority is the power to make decisions which guide the action of another. It is a relationship between two individuals—one of them superior, and the other a subordinate. The superior frames and transmits decisions, with the expectation that the subordinates will accept and comply with them. The subordinate expects such decisions, and his behaviour is determined by them.

Characteristics of Authority :

(1) Exercise of authority drives staff of the organization to perform the tasks and responsibility assigned to them :

Authority means the right to influence the behavior of others. The right may flow from a legal-institutional framework (a law governing the organization, or a manual, or guidelines framed by the organi­zation). The right may also be rooted in tradition, or the charisma of a person.

Shareholders of a company appoint directors and delegate to them authority to manage the affairs of the company. They do so because the Company Law gives them this authority. Parents ask or order children to do or not to do anything.

This is example of traditional authority. A person with extraor­dinary characteristics (charisma) exercises authority over his followers, even though the followers are neither bound by any law or tradition to do so. They follow the leader because, according to their per­ception, he articulates their feelings and aspirations.

(2) Only person holding authority can make decisions :

Decision-making is the main feature of authority. A manager has authority to order his subordinates to act or not to act in a particular manner. He does this because he has made decision about the work behavior of his subordinates.

(3) Exercise of authority may sometimes have element of subjectivity :

There is legal or traditional framework in an organization within which authority may be exercised. A manager has authority to reward and punish his subordinates based on their performance. But his decision to do so is often influenced by his personal likes and dislikes and socio-economic, educational and cultural background.

A manager who started working decades ago on a three-digit salary might have butterflies in stomach when he appoints staff on a salary many times exceeding his own when he had jointed the organization. For a while he forgets that under the current global business scenario, an efficient worker would stay only if his compensation package compares favorably with that of similarly qualified work­ers in other organizations.

Theories of ‘Sources of Authority’:

Which is the Fountainhead of Authority?

Authority is a formal or institutionalized form of power vested in a position or office.

There are various theories to explain the sources of authority, important among them are as follows:

1. ‘Formal’, ‘Traditional’ or ‘Top-Down’ theory.

2. ‘Acceptance’ or ‘Bottom-up’ theory.

3. ‘Competence’ or ‘Personal Authority’ theory.

1. ‘Formal’, ‘Traditional’ or ‘Top-Down Theory’ of Authority :

Formal authority flows from law, rules, and regulations that are framed by, or with the consent of all stakeholders. For example, shareholders of a company are the source of all legal authority to con­trol and manage its affairs. Through legal process, they delegate this authority to Board of directors elected/selected by them.

The Board, on its part, selects and appoints staff that will help it accom­plish the tasks and responsibility necessary to achieve organizational goals. Then, it assigns tasks and responsibility to the staff, based on their competence levels. Assignment of tasks and responsibility will be meaningful only when it is accompanied by delegation of necessary authority to perform the assigned tasks and responsibility.

Top managers of the company owe responsibility and accountability to their superiors—the board of directors—who on their part are responsible and accountable to shareholders. Top managers appoint senior and junior level managers and assign tasks and responsibility to them to perform and dele­gate them appropriate authority to operate and control the resources placed under their control. Their reward is the salary and prospects of promotion to higher responsibility positions in the organization.

The flow of legal authority is top-down at each level. Delegation of authority from a manager to a subordinate is in proportion to the nature of tasks and responsibility assigned to the subordinate. However, delegation of authority does not diminish the authority and responsibility of the manager- he continues to be the source of authority vested in him and also continues to be responsible for per­formance of the assigned task by him and/or his subordinate(s).

2. ‘Acceptance Theory’ of Authority :

Acceptance theory of authority is the exact opposite of the traditional, formal theory of authority. According to acceptance theory, authority of a manager will be in direct proportion to the acceptance given to his authority by his subordinates. Legal authority or social or cultural norms become irrele­vant here. If the subordinates do not accept the authority of manager, they may not willingly comply with his decisions and orders – they may even defy them.

The acceptance theory was formulated by Chester Barnard who held that authority lies in the character of a communication (order) issued in a formal organization which makes it acceptable to the persons for whom it is intended. The essence of the theory is that any authority is as effective or inef­fective as the willingness or unwillingness of subordinates to accept it.

According to Barnard, “an individual will accept the exercise of authority by his superior if the advantages to him from accepting the authority and the disadvantages from not accepting the authority are greater than the advantages from not accepting and the disadvantages from accepting; conversely, he will not accept the exercise of authority if the latter factors are greater than the former.”

This means that a subordinate will accept authority only if it falls within his zone of acceptance. His zone of acceptance will be determined by a number of factors.

For example, exercise of authority by his manager will fall within his zone of acceptance if the following conditions are satisfied:

(a) If the rewards arising from acceptance of authority are greater than the value of skills and effort that he would be required to spend on performing the task or responsibility;

(b) If he has a strong sense of belonging to the organization and hence would willingly accept the authority without subjecting it to cost-benefit analysis; and

(c) If the consequences of not accepting the authority would damage his career prospects in the organization, including perhaps loss of job.

Acceptance theory would be put to test only when a manager takes a decision and communicates it to his subordinate(s). If the subordinate ably and willingly accept to perform the assigned tasks or responsibility, and performs it in the manner desired by the manager, he can rest content that his authority enjoys acceptance.

Now the question – What source of authority would best enable a manager to perform his task? Formal and legal authority would empower him to secure performance from his subordinates through adoption of the ‘carrot and stick’ policy—reward to subordinate if the task or responsibility assigned to him is performed to the satisfaction of the manager, and punishment if it is not.

However, the ideal source of authority is that under which the subordinates accept to perform the assigned task and responsibility because they trust the ability and integrity of the manager. To sum up, the ultimate source of authority rests equally on legal, social and cultural norms that fulfill the test of validity and voluntary acceptance of authority by subordinates.

3. ‘Competence Theory’ of Authority :

A person can influence the behavior of others even if he does not command any formal, legal or tra­ditional authority. This happens when he enjoys support and confidence of his followers because they see him as personification of their urges and aspirations. They do so also because they trust his extraordinary technical, social and human qualities.

At the root of his authority are his competence, charisma and leader-like qualities. Thus, union leaders of an organization may select a relatively junior worker to present their case before the top management for increase in salaries because they feel he is forceful and logical in arguing the case and has at his command well-documented evidence to support his viewpoint.

‘Tradition-Centric’ Authority :

Every civilized society follows certain traditions and carefully protects and preserves them. Respect­ing and serving elders in family and society is an age-old tradition, so is responsibility of parents to raise and properly educate and train children for life ahead. Lord Ram went into exile to honor the promise once made by his father. Shravan Kumar spent his youth carrying parents on his shoulders to pilgrim centers. It is a different matter though that in the modern society this tradition-conferred authority is suffering dilution.

Senior citizens are willingly offered seats in crowded buses and trains; no one minds their jump­ing the queue to visit a doctor, or to withdraw money from bank. Tradition-centric authority has a lot to commend itself, only it should not become a tool to exploit people who respect it.

Responsibility :

Meaning of Responsibility :

The term responsibility has been interpreted in two different ways. Some writers define as a duty while others call it an obligation. In a more comprehensive sense responsibility can be defined as an obligation of a subordinate to perform the duties assigned to him.

Thus the responsibility is the obligation to perform certain functions and achieve results. It is the liability for proper discharge of duties. According to Koontz and O’Donnell “the obligation of a subordinate to whom a duty has been assigned to perform the duty”.

“Duty” or “responsibility” refers to an obligation or liability for performance of a task or responsibility that is assigned. Assignment of a task or responsibility casts a duty to perform something. It means the person who has been assigned a task or responsibility has a duty or obligation to perform it. Koontz and O’ Donnel define it as the obligation of a subordinate, to whom a superior has assigned a task and dele­gated authority, to perform the task as required.

Is ‘Responsibility’ Different from ‘Accountability’?

Accountability means an obligation on the part of a person to account for, or explain, why the task or responsibility assigned to him has not been performed as desired. A person will be accountable only when he has been assigned any task or responsibility by the person who commands authority over him.

Accountability will shrink or expand with the nature of responsibility assigned. A manager is accountable only to his superior but the top management owes the maximum accountability.

Task or Responsibility only Assigned to Human Beings :

Task or responsibility can only be assigned to humans. Non-living inanimate beings – machine, tool, capital – cannot be assigned task or responsibility. They do not work on their own; they need humans to work them. For this reason they cannot be held accountable for failure or deficiency of performance.

Assignment of Task or Responsibility Requires Two or more Persons :

Assignment of task or responsibility requires, first, an authority-holding person to assign the task or responsibility and, second, one or more subordinates to perform that task or responsibility. Only a per­son holding authority—legal, traditional or competence—can assign task or responsibility. Likewise, only a person who is subordinate to the authority-holding person can be assigned task or responsibil­ity.

Manager Commands, Subordinates Obey :

In a business organization a manager is vested with official and legal authority which empowers him to assign tasks and responsibility to his subordinates and demand accountability from them in respect of performance of those tasks and responsibility. The subordinates accept responsibility and are accountable because they are bound by service contract that requires them to do so to become entitled to monetary and other benefits and privileges provided by the organization.

Continuous or Specific-Duration Task or Responsibility :

Task or responsibility assigned to a subordinate may be a continuing obligation, or it may be limited in terms of time or tasks. The relationship between CEO and the production manager of a company is a case of continuing responsibility – the production manager must keep performing his task or responsi­bility so long as he is in the employment of the company. However, relationship between CEO and an auditor who is appointed annually to conduct audit of the company accounts is a specific duration task or responsibility.

Duty or responsibility may be in terms of functions, targets or goals. For example, when a worker is assigned the task of operating a machine, his responsibility is to ensure that the machine is opera­tionally fit. But if he is assigned the task of producing 100 units daily on the machine, his responsibility is expressed in terms of a quantitative target. Responsibility in terms of quantitative targets is pref­erable to general, non-quantitative responsibility.

The task or responsibility to produce minimum 100 units per day is a task or responsibility expressed in quantitative terms. It will inspire the worker to achieve the target and he will experience a sense of fulfilment if he attains the target. But if the sales manager is assigned the task of improving sales performance, it will be difficult for him to work out at what point the sales performance will be deemed satisfactory by his superior.

These are the main characteristics of the responsibility:

1. The essence of responsibility is obligation to perform the assigned duty or task.

2. Responsibility arises from superior subordinate relationships. When a superior assigns some work to a subordinate, the latter becomes responsible for performance of tasks.

3. Responsibility has no meaning except as applied to a promotion. A building or machine etc. cannot be held responsible.

4. Responsibility may be a continuing obligation or specific obligation.

5. Responsibility is a personal attribute and it cannot be deleted.

6. Responsibility is a concomitant of authority, therefore authority and responsibility should be equal.

Authority and Responsibility in Management – Nature, Definition and Source

Organizing will not end by dividing the originations into smaller homogeneous units. These units must be structured together and their efforts directed towards attaining the goals of the enterprise. Establishing vertical and horizontal relationships can do this more effectively through the sharing of authority effected by delegation.

To run the organization towards its goal and objectives the authority of the executive has to be re-delegated to the managers down the line to reach the bottom line managers. In every organization, this process of re-delegation is essential to run the organization. Thus, the concept of authority arises from the chain, which ties together the sections emanating from different persons in the organization.

Nature of Authority and Definition :

The word authority is used with different meanings as:

A person with superior knowledge and skill is described as an authority in the sense of an expert.

In a business organization, which is authoritarian in nature, the word authority refers to the power of an individuals to direct others by giving orders.

Henry Fayol defines authority as “the right to give orders and the power to extract the obedience.”

Allen defines authority as “the sum of the powers and rights entrusted to make possible the performance of the work delegated.” This definition emphasise the right and power aspects and adds another dimension, namely the implication that the authority is delegated with a view to performance of the work and is delegated to the extent of the responsibility for the work entrusted to the delegatee.

For practical purposes, the term authority can be defined as the legal and rightful power to command or to extract action from others. It is the power or the right to act, to command or to extract action by others. Because the manager gets the work done by subordinates, authority constitutes as the key to manager’s job. Authority and right to command helps the manager get work done by others in the organization and the degree of authority goes on descending down the line.

Source of Authority :

There are two versions of theory of authority.

(i) Formal authority theory, and

(ii) Acceptance theory.

But as per Koontz O’ Donnel source of authority is discussed under three headings:

(i) The formal authority theory,

(ii) The acceptance theory, and

(iii) The competence theory.

(i) The Formal Authority Theory:

The people who have belief in his theory, accept the basis that the ultimate source of authority in a business firm is embedded in the institution of private property, which is interested in a; person power over material resources. Many academic theorists of the formal authority view the legal aspects of private property as the source of authority.

(ii) The Acceptance Theory:

This theory is very simple, because the followers of this theory believe that the authority flows to a manager through acceptance by his subordinates of his power to make and implement decisions.

As Chester I. Bernard writes that “Authority is the character of communication (order) in a formal organization by virtue of which it is accepted by a contributor to or member of the organization as governing the action he contributes; that is, as governing or determining what he does or is not to do so fare as the organization is concerned”.

As per this definition, there are two aspects involved in the concept of authority.

(a) The subjective aspect that is the personal aspect of accepting a communication or order as authoritative; and

(b) The objective aspect that is the character in the communication by virtue of which it is accepted.

The subordinate will accept the authority of a command, understand it, believe it and follow it in the interest of the organization. Bernard says that the subordinate automatically accepts most orders given by the manager. The acceptance theory really emphasizing the leadership function of management that is the ability to persuade others to work well in the interest of goals/objectives of enterprise.

(iii) The Competence Theory:

This theory believes that the technical competence and personal competence are the basis of authority. Some persons having attractive personality command others to work. By mere his personality people seek his advice and obey it. Sometimes it so happens these attractive and commanding personality do not have any authority, but people waits for his guidance and follow it taking it as an order.

But one must understand that the fact that the fundamental source of authority is formal authority emanating from an institutional framework or from an organizational structure.

Responsibility is the obligation of a subordinate to perform a duty, which has been assigned to him by his superior. This shows that the obligation is the essence of responsibility. In view of organizational set up, the superior-subordinate relationship gives rise to this responsibility as the superior is vested with the authority to get the specified work done by his subordinates.

In general, in business organizations, the authority is a result of the contractual agreement, under which the subordinate have agreed to perform certain services in return of monitory benefit. Authority flows from superior to the subordinate manager to whom certain duties are assigned and responsibility is the obligation of the subordinate to accomplish these duties. Responsibility can be discharged by a single action or it may be a continuous obligation.

Responsibility and Delegation :

A manager can delegate his authority to his subordinate, but responsibility cannot be delegated. A manager is responsible for the performance of the duties even though he may delegate to a subordinate authority to accomplish a service and the subordinate also in his turn may delegate a part of his authority received by him. Delegation of authority to a subordinate will not relieve a manager from responsibility to perform his duties.

Authority and Responsibility in Management – Concept and Relationship between Authority and Responsibility in Management

Concept of Authority:

Authority is one of the important considerations in the process of management. Managerial action in a formal organisation needs authority. Without authority, the executive cannot secure compliance of his orders from his subordinates. It is always considered to be the key to a successful Managerial job. It is the power of the superior to make decisions which guides the actions of his subordinates.

Getting things done by people is not possible without compliance on the part of subordinates and the authority which ensures compliance. Authority is the only cohesive force that sets in motion the integrated activities of sub-ordinates in an enterprise. It is the means through which co-operative activity becomes a success and common objectives are achieved.

Securing compliance or obedience is the main objective behind the whole concept of authority. It can be acquired through persuasion, sanction, coercion, constraints or force.

The managerial authority is a rightful permission to act for the enterprise instruct the subordinates, impose penalty for wrong doings, use company property or to speak or act as a representatives of the enterprise.

The whole organisational structure is based on the concept of authority without use of authority, anarchy and utter confusion will prevail all around the enterprise Authority is usually respected, recognised and followed in the organisation as a matter of course. Authority is generally adopted with power to secure obedience. This customary acceptance of authority is a part of our culture and day- to-day behaviour.

But compliance of actions and carrying out of instructions by subordinates cannot always be assured merely because the authority is customarily accepted. Delegation of authority establishes relationships. Vertical delegation of authority determines relationship between a boss and his subordinate and the horizontal division of authority determines the degree of decentralisation.

A few definitions of the term “authority” are given below:

“Authority is the right to give orders and the power to obedience”. – Henry Fayol

“Authority is the official and the legal right to command action by others and to enforce compliance. Compliance is obtained in a number of ways trough persuasion, sanctions, request, coercion, constraint or force”. – George R. Terry

“Authority means the Power to command others- to act or not to act in a manner deemed fit by the possessor of the authority and is exercised in furtherance of the enterprise or departmental purpose”. – Koontz and O’Donnell

From the above definitions, two points become clear that the possessor of authority influences the activity and behaviour of other individuals or groups and that he has the right to issue orders and ensure their compliance by subordinates.

Authority vs. Power:

Authority may not mean the same thing as power A person many have the power to influence the activity and behaviour of other persons but he may not have the official or legal right of command and thus enforce compliance by others. Such a person would have power but no authority. It may, therefore, be said that authority includes power but power may or may not be supported by authority. Also, all authority is formal.

Types of Authority:

Authority is of Five Types:

1. Formal Authority:

According to some writers all authority is formal. It stems from the top and is transmitted downwards through the line by the process of delegation. The authority which a manager possesses, because of his organisational position, is known as formal authority.

2. Acceptance Authority:

Under the acceptance theory, it is believed that authority comes to the manager by the acceptance of power to make and enforce decisions through his subordinates. Accordingly manager has no authority until it is conferred upon him by his sub-ordinates.

A sub­ordinates may accept the authority of the manager because – (i) he wants to contribute to the accomplishment of organisational objective (ii) he wants to obtain some reward by accepting it. (iii) He wants to avoid disciplinary action, (iv) he regards the maturity, age or experience of superior (v) he wants to avoid responsibility, (vi) he believes that the authority is legitimate and should be followed.

But the acceptance theory has been criticised on the grounds that:

i. It is unrealistic.

ii. It assumes that a subordinate has the option to accept or reject authority and

iii. It ignores the organisational situation of the possessor of the authority.

3. Authority of the Situation:

G. R. Terry observes “In almost every enterprise, emergency and unusual events accrue which are not provided for in the organisational set-up. When such an event occurs, the person assuming authority to meet the particular circumstances is said to have derived the authority of the situation. Such an authority exists only till emergency lasts”.

4. Position Authority:

It is the authority a person enjoys by virtue of his superior position in the organisation. Normally subordinates recognize authority of those occupying higher hierarchical positions.

5. Technical Authority:

Since 1950 the term technical authority or computer authority has come into use. Such authority stems the decision making power granted to the processed data by a computer. But since authority is a human possession, such authority may be described as that authority which is possessed by the person who either interprets computer processed results and data or underlines their significant managerial meanings for others.

Limits of Authority :

Unlimited authority always tends to be an instrument of corruption, It should therefore, have arid generally does have some limitations, which may be express and implied.

Some of these limitations are:

1. Authority is subject to the physical and mental capacity of the subordinate who has to exercise it.

2. Authority may be subjected to the bye-laws, standing orders, rules and regulation of the company (as per articles and memorandum of the company)

3. Authority may be subject to the social beliefs, codes, creeds and habits of the group over which it has to be exercised.

4. Laws, trade practices etc. may also impose certain limitations on the use of authority.

Thus, as a matter of fact, there should be blending of power and influence to make the authority really effective. The other means, that it can help in making authority more effective and may include the backing and support to lower executives, from the top executives, due attention to their advice, usually confirming their decisions, permitting command to flow through proper channels and supplying adequate information and materials to them.

Other General Limits of Authority:

There are any limitations to the concept of authority. Authority is never absolute like responsibility. It changes with time, position and group behaviour of the subordinates etc. While exercising authority, the manager must keep the following limitations in his mind. It will help him in successful utilization of his authority.

They are as follows:

1. Regard for the Mores and Folk Ways of the Group:

Authority when used commands reaction from individual as well as groups. It may be favourable or unfavourable. So a manager while using authority, must keep in his mind, the reaction of his orders on employees, shareholders and customers etc.

2. Legal Limitations:

A manager’s authority is restricted by the enterprise goals, objectives, politics, programmes and procedures etc. These are governed by the articles and memorandum of association which are governed themselves by the commercial and industrial laws of the country. Every manager at any level in the organisation, must respect the laws, traditions and restrictions etc.

3. Natural or Biological Limitations:

No subordinate can be ordered to do a job which is impossible to be performed due to biological limitations. For example, one can hardly order a person to walk up to side of a building or do such impossible things.

4. Physical Limitations:

Physical limitations such as climate, geography, chemical elements and so on, have their limiting effect on authority. For example an order to make gold from copper.

5. Technological Limitations:

There are technological limits on authority too. Until and unless any performance is technically possible an order to do any such work would be unworthy.

6. Economic Limitations:

Sometimes a manager may not get the work done from the subordinates if the wages are not according to their expectation. The competition in prices of the product and other economic factors also affect the authority.

7. Authority Delegation Limitations:

The extent of delegation of authority also restricts the authority of a manager. Generally the authority to make decisions or the right to command decreases as it proceeds from the highest to lowest level of an organisation.

Responsibility:

Responsibility is the most misunderstood term in the literature of management. It is common to hear about delegating responsibilities, holding a person responsible, discharging responsibilities and carrying out a responsibility. The term Responsibility is, most of the times, used to mean duty, activity, liability, accountability or even authority.

According to Koontz and O’Donnell, “Viewed internally with respect to the enterprise, responsibility may be defined as the obligation of a subordinate, to whom a superior has assigned a duty to perform a service required. The essence of responsibility is then, obligation.”

Responsibility is also an important concept and has been defined as follows:

Responsibility is an obligation of the individual to perform assigned duties to the best of his ability under the direction of his executive leader. – Keith Davis

Responsibility is the obligation of a subordinate to perform his duty as required by his superior – Theo Haiman

Responsibility results from a superior subordinate relationship. It may continue or cease with the accomplishment of the desired objective.

It involves:

1. Compliance

2. Obedience and

3. Dependability.

Failure to observe these elements may call for a penalty, punishment or disciplinary action against the erring subordinate.

Responsibility Relates to human beings only. A building, a machine or an animal cannot be held responsible. Responsibility arises from the superior subordinate relationship, from the fact that a superior has the authority to get specific services from his subordinate. The relationship between a president and his sales managers is typical of the continuing type of obligation.

On the other hand, when the president hires some lower for seeking legal advice and advocating a particular case in the court of law, his obligation comes to an end when the assignment is completed. In an enterprise responsibility is accepted by a subordinate due to contractual relationship and in turn, he gets monetary or other rewards.

While the authority flows from a superior to a subordinate when assignment of duty is made, the responsibility flows from a subordinate to his superior when former undertakes the obligation of accomplishing the duties assigned to him.

Thus, responsibility is an obligation to carry out certain tasks. In an organisation responsibility is the obligation of a subordinate to perform his duty as required by his superior. Responsibility is closely related to authority. It is exacted upwards whereas authority flows downwards. A manager is responsible ultimately for the performance of his duties even though he has delegated it to his subordinates. Therefore responsibility cannot be delegated.

Authority – Responsibility Relationship:

Authority and responsibility of a manager should be co-equal i.e. authority should be commensurate with responsibility. According to George R. Terry, responsibility is inseparable, there is every danger that it may be misused by the possessor. Similarly, if responsibility is greater than authority, the tendency of the management becomes difficult and even ineffective. In order to ensure that authority and responsibility are co-equal, a correlative action may be resorted to.

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How to Delegate Effectively: 9 Tips for Managers

Manager Delegating Work to an Employee

  • 14 Jan 2020

Delegation is a vital management skill . But for some, it’s the hardest to put into practice.

There are several reasons why managers may shy away from delegating work. They might:

  • Think it would take longer to explain the task than actually completing it themselves
  • Want to feel indispensable to their team by being the keeper of specific knowledge
  • Enjoy completing certain projects so prefer not to reassign them
  • Feel guilty about adding more work onto another employee’s to-do list
  • Lack confidence or trust in who they need to transfer the project to
  • Believe that they’re the only ones who can do the job right

Whatever the reason, it’s important to continue honing the skill, as refusing to delegate can have negative consequences. Not only will you overload your schedule and prioritize the wrong tasks, but your employees will miss out on valuable learning and growth opportunities.

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What Is Delegation and Why Is It Important?

Delegation refers to the transfer of responsibility for specific tasks from one person to another.

From a management perspective, delegation occurs when a manager assigns specific tasks to their employees. By delegating those tasks to team members, managers free up time to focus on higher-value activities while also keeping employees engaged with greater autonomy.

According to a Gallup study , CEOs who excel in delegating generate 33 percent higher revenue. These executives know they can’t accomplish everything alone and position their team to tackle tasks they’re confident they’ll achieve—in turn empowering employees, boosting morale, and increasing productivity. In the process, CEOs free up their time to focus on activities that will yield the highest returns and grow the company.

Here are nine ways you can start delegating more effectively to cultivate high-performing teams.

9 Delegation Tips for Managers

1. know what to delegate.

Not every task can be delegated. For example, performance reviews or any personnel matters should be handled by you. After all, hiring the right talent and knowing each employee’s strengths and weaknesses will ultimately make you better at assigning deliverables and transferring responsibility to the appropriate team members.

Several other day-to-day activities don’t require your oversight, though. Is there a task you regularly tackle despite knowing your co-worker is better equipped to complete it? Would assigning the project to other employees help bolster their careers? If there’s someone who could do the work better, or you think this could be a teachable moment, delegate. It will show you trust and value your team, while also giving you time to focus on more strategic projects.

2. Play to Your Employees’ Strengths and Goals

Every employee should have goals they’re working toward, and within those goals are opportunities to delegate. For example, maybe you have a direct report who wants to gain management experience. Is there an intern they could start supervising, or a well-defined project they can own the execution of? The type of work you delegate could factor into their professional development plan.

For other tasks, there’s likely someone on your team with the specific skill set needed to achieve the desired result. Leverage that and play to your employees’ strengths. When someone has a higher chance of excelling, they’re more motivated and engaged , which then benefits the entire business.

Related: How to Become a Better Manager

3. Define the Desired Outcome

Simply dumping work onto someone else’s plate isn’t delegating. The projects you hand off should come with proper context and a clear tie into the organization’s goals.

“You’ve got to have real clarity of objective,” says Harvard Business School Professor Kevin Sharer in the online Management Essentials course . That includes having alignment on “what does good look like” and by what timeline, and “the technique of measuring accomplishment.”

Before anyone starts working on a project, they should know what they need to complete and by when, including the metrics you’ll use to measure the success of their work.

4. Provide the Right Resources and Level of Authority

If the person you’re delegating work to needs specific training, resources, or authority to complete the assigned project, it’s your role as a manager to provide all three. Setting someone up for an impossible task will frustrate both sides; your colleague won’t be able to achieve the desired outcome, and then you’ll likely need to put that work back on your to-do list.

This is also where you need to fight the urge to micromanage . Telling your co-worker, step-by-step, how you would accomplish the task and then controlling each part of the process won’t enable them to learn or gain new skills. Focus instead on what the desired end goal is, why the task is important, and help address any gaps between the outcome and their current skill set.

5. Establish a Clear Communication Channel

While you want to avoid micromanaging, you do want to establish a communication channel so that the person you’re delegating to feels comfortable asking questions and providing progress updates.

“You’ve got to have some way to communicate so that the person you delegated to can come back to you and report,” says Sharer in the Management Essentials course . “You’ve got to have some way along the way to see how things are going. It isn’t fire and forget. That is, ‘I just give you the task and I don’t worry about it anymore. We’ve got to have some way to monitor the progress along the way without me getting in your way.’”

Setting up regular check-ins and providing feedback throughout the project can help with this.

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6. Allow for Failure

This step is particularly important for the perfectionists who avoid delegating because they think their way is the only way to get the work done. You need to allow for failure—not because your employees might fail, but because it will enable experimentation and empower the people you’re assigning tasks to, to take a new approach.

If you’re open to new ideas and approaches to the work, you’ll have an easier time delegating when able.

7. Be Patient

As a manager, you likely have more years of experience in your field. Because of this, a task you can complete in 30 minutes might take an employee a full hour the first time they complete it.

You might be tempted to refrain from delegating certain tasks knowing that you can get them done faster, but be patient with your employees. Think back to the first time you completed a specific task early on in your career. You probably weren’t as efficient as you are now; your time management skills have improved.

As you continue to delegate and your employees become more familiar with the tasks that need to be completed, you’ll notice that the work will get done faster over time.

Related: 7 Strategies for Improving Your Management Skills

8. Deliver (and Ask For) Feedback

In addition to monitoring progress, you should also deliver feedback to your employees after the tasks you’ve delegated are complete.

If a task wasn’t completed as assigned, don’t be afraid to offer constructive criticism. Your employees can take this feedback and make changes the next time a similar task is assigned. On the other hand, remember to provide positive feedback and show your appreciation when a task was done well.

To ensure you’re delegating effectively, you’ll also want to ask your team for any feedback that they can give you. Ask your employees if you provided clear instructions and determine if there’s anything you can do to better delegate in the future.

9. Give Credit Where It’s Due

After you’ve delegated tasks and they’ve been seen through to completion, credit those who achieved the work.

“Recognizing that success is because of your team is not only right, but it has the added benefit of making those around you more engaged—making you even more successful,” writes HBS Online Executive Director Patrick Mullane for Richtopia. “It’s counter-intuitive, but not claiming success for yourself will lead to more future wins.”

The more you thank and credit those you’ve delegated work to, the more likely it is they will want to help you on other projects in the future.

Management Essentials | Get the job done | Learn More

Honing Your Delegation Skills

Delegating isn’t easy; it’s a skill that must be practiced and honed over time. But the better you become at aligning the right people with the right tasks and responsibilities, the more effective you’ll become at your job as a manager.

Are you interested in further improving your managerial skills? Download our free leadership and management e-book to find out how. Also, explore our eight-week online Management Essentials course , which will provide you with real-world tools and strategies to excel in decision-making, implementation, organizational learning, and change management.

This post was updated on June 2, 2021. It was originally published on January 14, 2020.

assignment of responsibility meaning

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Synonyms & Similar Words

  • responsibility
  • undertaking
  • requirement
  • designation
  • appointment
  • authorization
  • installment
  • installation
  • destination
  • emplacement
  • investiture
  • singling (out)

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

  • dethronement

Synonym Chooser

How does the noun assignment contrast with its synonyms?

Some common synonyms of assignment are chore , duty , job , stint , and task . While all these words mean "a piece of work to be done," assignment implies a definite limited task assigned by one in authority.

When is it sensible to use chore instead of assignment ?

While the synonyms chore and assignment are close in meaning, chore implies a minor routine activity necessary for maintaining a household or farm.

When is duty a more appropriate choice than assignment ?

Although the words duty and assignment have much in common, duty implies an obligation to perform or responsibility for performance.

When might job be a better fit than assignment ?

The synonyms job and assignment are sometimes interchangeable, but job applies to a piece of work voluntarily performed; it may sometimes suggest difficulty or importance.

When could stint be used to replace assignment ?

In some situations, the words stint and assignment are roughly equivalent. However, stint implies a carefully allotted or measured quantity of assigned work or service.

When can task be used instead of assignment ?

The meanings of task and assignment largely overlap; however, task implies work imposed by a person in authority or an employer or by circumstance.

Thesaurus Entries Near assignment

assignments

Cite this Entry

“Assignment.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/assignment. Accessed 22 Feb. 2024.

More from Merriam-Webster on assignment

Nglish: Translation of assignment for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of assignment for Arabic Speakers

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IMAGES

  1. Understanding the Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RACI Matrix

    assignment of responsibility meaning

  2. Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RACI) PowerPoint Template

    assignment of responsibility meaning

  3. How to Benefit from the Responsibility Assignment Matrix

    assignment of responsibility meaning

  4. Creating a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM). Responsibility Matrix

    assignment of responsibility meaning

  5. Responsibility Assignment Matrix PowerPoint Template

    assignment of responsibility meaning

  6. Responsibility Assignment Matrix PowerPoint Template

    assignment of responsibility meaning

VIDEO

  1. Responsibility is what gives life meaning #jordanpeterson #shorts

  2. Responsibility Centres- Objectives & Determinants

COMMENTS

  1. Responsibility assignment matrix

    In business and project management, a responsibility assignment matrix [1] ( RAM ), also known as RACI matrix [2] ( / ˈreɪsi /) or linear responsibility chart [3] ( LRC ), is a model that describes the participation by various roles in completing tasks or deliverables [4] for a project or business process.

  2. What Is A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)? Everything You Need

    The responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) is a form of project management that encourages everyone to understand every step of the project.

  3. RACI Matrix: Responsibility Assignment Matrix Guide for 2024

    The matrix defines clear roles and responsibilities for individual team members across the various phases of the project, breaking each role down into four types of designation: those who are Responsible and Accountable for project deliverables, those who should be Consulted as work begins, and stakeholders who need to be Informed of ongoing pro...

  4. Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)

    A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) describes the participation of various organizations, people, and their roles in completing tasks or deliverables for a project. The Program Manager (PM) uses it to clarify roles and responsibilities in a cross-functional team, projects, and processes.

  5. Responsibility Assignment Matrix

    RACI Definition What is RACI's Expanded Form? How to Create a Responsibility Assignment Matrix? Benefits and Pitfalls of RACI Matrix Lesson Summary Frequently Asked Questions What is the...

  6. ASSIGN RESPONSIBILITY definition and meaning

    (rɪspɒnsɪbɪlɪti ) uncountable noun If you have responsibility for something or someone, or if they are your responsibility, it is your job or duty to deal with them and to take decisions relating to them. [...] See full entry for 'responsibility' Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers

  7. What Is a Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM)?

    Responsible: The person (s) completing the task Accountable: The team member coordinating the actions, making decisions, and delegating to those responsible for the task Consulted: The person (s) who will be communicated with regarding decisions and tasks Informed: The person (s) who will be updated during the project and upon completion

  8. Responsibility Assignment (RACI) Matrix: A Comprehensive Guide

    What Exactly Is the Responsibility Assignment (RACI) Matrix? A common problem in many projects is that team members have a wrong perception of their roles and roles of others. Often enough, there is a difference between what a person thinks their role is and what the organizer thinks they should be doing.

  9. Responsibility Assignment Matrix: Template, Example & Benefits

    A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM), sometimes referred to as a RACI chart or RACI matrix, in project management identifies all relevant stakeholders and specifies roles for cross-functional teams and their level of involvement in a project. Each letter in the acronym RACI, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed ...

  10. Roles, responsibilities, and resources

    Another useful tool is the Responsibility Assignment Matrix, often called a RACI Chart (RACI stands for "Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed"). ... Deming was first to realize that "divided responsibility means that no one is responsible," meaning that if there are two or more project managers in charge, none of them will ...

  11. A template-based approach for responsibility management in executable

    A Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) provides a way to plan, organise and coordinate work that consists of assigning different degrees of responsibility to the members of an organisation for each activity undertaken in it (Website 2016). RAMs were defined independently of Business Process Management (BPM) and thus, they are suitable for ...

  12. Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RACI Matrix) Explained

    The acronym 'RACI' stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. These are the four categories of involvement in a project, and each individual or team involved in the project is assigned one of these project roles. Let's first dig into what they mean…

  13. What is a responsibility matrix and how to create it

    To meet the various challenges of project management, the responsibility matrix, also called the RACI chart, is proving to be an indispensable governance tool for companies.. The success of your projects depends on good project management and a clear vision of the responsibilities of the people assigned.Each manager, and especially the project manager, should define an overview of the roles in ...

  14. Assignment of Responsibilities

    The actual pattern of responsibility assignment depends on the electoral management body's administrative structure and any legally defined accountability. Too many responsibilities assigned to centralised levels of authority wastes available expertise and limits its further development in any local or field offices. There is a need to ensure ...

  15. Authority and Responsibility in Management

    Assignment of task or responsibility requires, first, an authority-holding person to assign the task or responsibility and, second, one or more subordinates to perform that task or responsibility. ... Responsibility has no meaning except as applied to a promotion. A building or machine etc. cannot be held responsible. 4. Responsibility may be a ...

  16. How to Delegate Effectively: 9 Tips for Managers

    To ensure you're delegating effectively, you'll also want to ask your team for any feedback that they can give you. Ask your employees if you provided clear instructions and determine if there's anything you can do to better delegate in the future. 9. Give Credit Where It's Due.

  17. Responsibility Accounting

    Identification of Responsibility Center - The whole concept of responsibility accounting depends on identifying the responsibility center. The responsibility center defines the decision point in the organization. Generally, in small organizations, one person, probably the firm's owner, can manage the entire organization.

  18. The Importance of Work Responsibility and How to Achieve More

    1. Reveals your character Your responsibility for your workplace duties demonstrates your work ethic. Being a responsible employee shows you take pride in your work and validates your worth. Supervisors will view you as a dependable and self-reliant employee and have faith in your abilities. 2. Helps secure your position

  19. Assignment of responsibility and Definition

    Related to Assignment of responsibility and. Area of responsibility means the geographical area, as. Assignment of Recognition Agreement With respect to a Cooperative Loan, an assignment of the Recognition Agreement sufficient under the laws of the jurisdiction wherein the related Cooperative Unit is located to reflect the assignment of such Recognition Agreement.

  20. Assignment of Contract: What Is It? How It Works

    An assignment of contract is a legal term that describes the process that occurs when the original party (assignor) transfers their rights and obligations under their contract to a third party (assignee). When an assignment of contract happens, the original party is relieved of their contractual duties, and their role is replaced by the ...

  21. Assignment of responsibility definition and meaning

    noun A duty that you are assigned to perform (especially in the armed forces) of Denoting identity or equivalence; -- used with a name or appellation, and equivalent to the relation of apposition; as, the continent of America; the city of Rome; the Island of Cuba. responsibility noun

  22. ASSIGNMENT Synonyms: 97 Similar and Opposite Words

    Synonyms for ASSIGNMENT: task, job, duty, project, mission, chore, responsibility, function; Antonyms of ASSIGNMENT: dismissal, discharge, firing, expulsion ...

  23. Fiduciary Assignment Definition

    Related to Fiduciary Assignment. Delegation Agreement means any separate agreement entered into between the Custodian and the Fund or its authorized representative with respect to certain matters concerning the appointment and administration of Subcustodians delegated to the Custodian pursuant to Rule 17f-5.. Loan Assignment has the meaning set forth in the Purchase and Sale Agreement.