Impact of RACI on Delivery and Outcome of Software Development Projects

Software Development Projects have been often in news for wrong reasons, on account of project failures, schedule slippages, cost overruns and poor quality of software produced. This paper is the result of an study carried out to address this unpleasant reality by evaluating the methods & practices of Responsibility Assignments actually used and practiced on the software development projects selected for this study (from businesses and IT-industry in India), with overall objective of proposing better methods and prescriptive guidance for improving the chances of successful completion of business critical software development projects. This study has found that RACI Matrix is either not used or under-used during the course of planning & managing software projects studied, concluded as a factor contributing to Chaos of Software Projects. This paper also proposes a simple RACI-Matrix that can be employed by software project teams as a tool early in the project life cycle to set the expectations with stakeholders, to help successful completion of business critical software development projects and realization of business objectives for which the projects were undertaken.