By Cassie Solomon, RACI Solutions
In last week’s post, we described a comprehensive whitepaper that reviews the various project management tools that allow you to digitize RACI. In the whitepaper, we review the following tools:
- Monday.com
- Asana
- Smartsheet
- ClickUp
- Nulab’s Cacoo
- Lucid: Lucidchart & Lucidspark
- Wondershare's EdrawMax & EdrawMind
Please click HERE to download the whitepaper, where we review these tools, including samples of the RACI charts you can create and pricing plans. Some are better than others.
So, what’s missing?
Most of these tools have some strengths and some weaknesses, but what is missing from all of them is a HIERARCHY. What do I mean by this? I don’t mean the chain of command where one person reports to another. I do mean the classification or ranking so that some initiatives nest inside larger, more strategic initiatives. This is particularly important for strategy execution.
A concise definition of strategy is a course of action to achieve a specific goal. Here is a link to an excellent article on the Strategic Alignment Model developed by Henderson and Venkatraman and used by businesses all across the world.
For each element of strategy, there will be multiple efforts or projects. For example, if the company has an IT strategy that aligns with its business strategy, there will likely be multiple project teams who are working on linked projects that support this strategy.
The project management tools we reviewed all treat each project independently – you can build as many projects as you want to, but they are there in a big clump of projects without linking into something larger. If you are a senior executive who wants to review the progress of your strategic initiative, you can review each one on its own.
Decide Act has built software that supports strategy execution. In partnership with RACI Solutions, they have built a RACI module that satisfies each of the review criteria we used, and that allows you to track your progress against defined metrics and KPI’s. Their software also allows you to group projects into a HIERARCHY that allows you to link from an ambitious high-level strategy to day-to-day execution, including cross-functional alignment. With the help of the Decide Act platform, companies have “at a glance” overviews of the projects that belong to each strategic objective. The RACI functionality also gives you a chance to “pivot” the view and see what an individual is doing, across multiple projects.
For more information on Decide Act, click HERE for an introduction to the company.
