Who is actually accountable?
Build the matrix and have the two real failures pointed out — nobody accountable, and everybody accountable. Every rule is switchable, because house styles differ.
Who is Responsible, and who is Accountable
Build the matrix, and have the two failures that actually cause trouble pointed out: nobody accountable, and everybody accountable.
The matrix
R = does the work · A = answerable for it · C = consulted before · I = informed after. Leave blank for no involvement.
Which rules to apply
House styles genuinely differ, so these are switchable rather than assumed.
Load per person
What is checked, and why
- No Accountable on a row — an error. Accountability that is not assigned is not held by anyone.
- More than one Accountable — an error by default. Two accountable people generally means each assumes the other has it.
- No Responsible — a warning, not an error. An approval gate with an owner and no doer is legitimate.
- One person Responsible for most of the work — a warning. It is a delivery risk rather than a formatting mistake.
- Someone with no role at all — a note. Either they belong on the matrix or they do not.
All of the rules above are switchable because organisations really do differ — RASCI is common, and some run deliberate joint accountability. A matrix that breaks a rule you do not follow is not a broken matrix.
The distinction the whole thing rests on
Responsible does the work. Accountable answers for the result. They are frequently different people and the split is the entire point of the exercise — if every row has the same name in both columns, the matrix is a task list with extra steps.
The rule that there should be exactly one Accountable per row is not bureaucratic tidiness. Two accountable people is reliably worse than one, because each can reasonably believe the other is carrying it. That failure is quiet until the thing goes wrong, at which point it is very loud.
Consulted and Informed are a schedule cost
Consulted means their input is sought before the work is done — a two-way conversation that takes time and can block progress. Informed means they are told afterwards, which costs almost nothing.
Marking someone Consulted when Informed would do is one of the more expensive habits in project governance. Every C is a dependency on someone's availability, and a row with six of them is a row that will wait. If you find yourself with a column of Cs, the useful question is which of them genuinely change the outcome.
What a concentration warning means
If one person is Responsible for most of the delivery, the matrix is telling you something real about risk rather than about formatting. It usually means the plan has a single point of failure, and it is worth knowing before that person takes leave rather than after.