Roles & Responsibilities Map

Write down, role by role, what each role decides alone, what it must check first and who is accountable for each recurring activity, so that "I thought you were handling that" stops costing you a week.

Agreeing roles early has mixed research support from a thin base (Mathieu & Rapp, 2009). RACI is practice, not research, with no verified original source. Belbin's team roles have mixed support; the self-report inventory has drawn psychometric criticism (Belbin, 2010; review: Aritzeta, Swailes & Senior, 2007). The reversible versus irreversible split is a practitioner heuristic (Bezos, 2016). Response times and limits on this page are rules of thumb.

Use it when:

• A team is forming, reorganizing or taking on a new member.
• Work is done twice, or not at all, because two people each thought the other owned it.
• Decisions wait for one person, or keep being reopened by someone who was not asked.

Skip it when:

• The team does not yet agree what it is for: start with 4.1 Team Purpose & Outcomes.
• The confusion is about your own role with your manager: use 9.2 Expectations Alignment Canvas.

Most coordination failures are structural. When ownership and decision rights live in people's heads, every disagreement turns into a negotiation about who gets to decide; a written map settles that once. The evidence is layered. Agreeing roles and ways of working early has some empirical support, from a thin base (Mathieu & Rapp, 2009). RACI is a practitioner convention with no canonical source and no testing: useful discipline, no evidence claim. Belbin's team roles are a popular vocabulary whose self-assessment has drawn criticism for decades, so treat them as conversation aids, not measurement (Belbin, 2010). The reversible versus irreversible split comes from Amazon's shareholder letters (Bezos, 2016) and is likewise untested.

So the page earns its keep through a few rules. Each activity has exactly one accountable role, because a shared veto is no veto. Reversible decisions move fast with few people; the rare one-way decisions get scrutiny. And every critical skill has a named backup role. The limit: a map clarifies, but it cannot settle a conflict about priorities.

Write one row per role, not per person. Say why the role exists, what it may decide alone and what needs someone else's approval.

Strong answer: "Shift planner. Purpose: every route has a qualified driver each day. Decides alone: swaps between drivers within the same week. Needs approval from: the depot manager for overtime beyond the weekly budget." Not: "Handles planning and other duties as needed."

Illustrative example: the organization and roles are made up.

A depot manager at a regional bus operator in Norway sees the same row of problems every month: two people adjust the roster, overtime gets approved twice, and nobody tells the drivers.

Section 1: three role charters. The shift planner may swap drivers within a week but needs approval for overtime beyond the weekly budget. The workshop lead decides which bus is taken out of traffic for repairs. The depot manager approves overtime and leases.

Section 2: the weekly roster gets one A (depot manager) instead of two. Vehicle withdrawals: R workshop lead, A workshop lead, C shift planner, I drivers.

Section 3: reversible decisions (route check order, break rotation) move to the shift planner, posted in the team channel. Leases and new routes stay with the depot manager and the regional director.

Section 4: the route planning software had no backup; a senior driver is trained and the steps are written into the planning guide.

Within a month the double-approved overtime stopped, and the drivers heard about roster changes the same day.