The project my own personal favorite is what is known in the UK as a linear responsibility chart. In the US, it's most often known as the raci chart. And indeed that name is becoming quite common in the UK too. Although, strictly speaking, the raci chart name is originally been allocated to a slightly different representation of the same information. So what I'm going to describe to you is strictly speaking a linear responsibility chart. But you may come across a very similar chart with the name racing.

And by the way, raci stands for, for key roles on a project, the role of being responsible for a piece of work the role of being able to authorize it to have that accountability to authorize a piece of work, to be consulted on a piece of work, either for your expertise or for your impressions. And finally, to be informed. And of course, that traditional form of racy chart with those four roles is a little limiting. And so, of course, the advantage of the linear responsibility formulation is there's no presumption that those are the only four roles. Of course, you wouldn't make that assumption anyway, you'd use the roles you need. But how do we create a linear responsibility chart?

Well, we start by drawing a grid. And each row of that grid can represent a single task, or a cluster of tasks, what's sometimes known as a work package, or indeed a whole workstream a whole big chunk of the project. Or if you're managing multiple projects, you can use a linear responsibility chart. So get a hold Have you have the resourcing of multiple projects, so each row could literally represent a whole project. And each column is headed up with the name of one of the people on your project. So you have your resources across there.

And quite literally, I have had a linear responsibility chart for a profit with about 80 names across. It's a big big sheet of paper, quite small print. The next thing to do having understood what level and what are the tasks at that level that you want to plan at and who are the resources available to you is to determine the roles that are relevant to your project. For common generic roles that I frequently find myself using are first, the supervisor, the person who is going to lead on delivering a piece of work. The Secondly is the role of participating in doing the work. 30 is the role of an expert and recognize that you may have multiple different types of experts.

Thirdly is the person who has the authority fourthly, sorry, is the person who has the authority to sign off a piece of work is complete. But of course, there are many other sorts of roles. Now I rather than using words or initials tend to prefer putting symbols in to represent the saw come up with a key that represents those symbols. I strongly advocate you don't use color alone to indicate those roles because a significant proportion largely of men, but there are some women as well in a population are colorblind. And that means that there may be symbols with different colors with the same shape, but they can't distinguish. So script discriminate each row with its own symbol, and if in doubt, a letter or two as well.

Once you've done that, you can allocate roles to individuals. So on task one, individually, we'll get specific role. So let's take a look and populating a linear responsibility chart among our group of individuals. Now, the way I populated that I, I suspect some of you are looking at that already and thinking Hang on a moment. That doesn't make sense. And the great thing about a linear responsibility chart is when you plot out what people think they're doing, or indeed, what you've allocated carelessly, you start to spot mistakes you spot to spot activities when no one's in charge activities where two people in charge when I was doing the work activities when no one's signing it off, or the correct expert hasn't been identified, if one is needed.

You're also spot looking vertically where some people are overloaded with work, and some people are under loaded. And there are good reasons to look at the balance of workload. Firstly, we know that fairness is an important consideration in people Motivation at work if people don't consider their work to be fair, then their motivation will dip quite rapidly. Secondly, of course, you have key person risk if too much of the project is dependent on one individual, that's a substantial risk to your project. And thirdly, what about the risk of burnout? If someone has too much work, then they may feel overloaded, and that may lead them to be overwhelmed and to become stressed.

And finally, there is the very real question that if you overload someone too much, do they reach the point where they physically cannot do the work allocated to them in the time available. Now, every tool has its advantages, and its limitations because there is no tool that can do everything. And one of the limitations of a linear responsibility chart it says nothing about scheduling. In fact, he sets out roles and responsibilities across a whole project within a fixed project JIRA, So let's assume that the chart that we've got here is one, that is said, over a six week time period, 30 days, 30 working days, and we could look at the allocations and see them come up on the screen just like this. And you can see that that adds up to 28 days work scheduled in a 30 day period, on the face of it a very suitable allocation if you ignore the issues of fairness.

But I'm sure that many of you watching this are not at the moment and nor likely to be full time project managers or full time project team members. The project work is just one component of your responsibilities. You have other things to do. So let's put in the other responsibilities on an extra line. Now, let's say that this team member has to commit at least two days a week to their to like day job. Their steady state job, whilst working on the project, just keep things under control two days a week, over six weeks, that's 12 days on top of the 28 days of project work.

Now you're asking this person to do 40 days work in a 30 day period? Well, that's right. There's an easy solution to that. It's called weekends and seriously, never ever schedule weekend working. You may work in a culture where it doesn't pay to be queasy about asking people to come in on weekends, but if you schedule we can work, then where is your contingency if things go wrong, and fundamentally, people work the hours they're commissioned to work. It's not fair.

It's not right. And it's not healthy, to work them beyond those hours. So what we need to do is to look at the skills and the experience and the aspirations of other team members who have less than work on and start to reallocate work. And whilst high end project planning tools can do dynamic workload reallocation, they use sophisticated algorithms which you may not understand which may even not be published. To do that. using linear responsibility chart, you can do all the reallocation easily by hand, and really understand how you're we're allocating work.

Each team member can see their roles, they can see who they're working with, on what bits of the project, you can check each task is properly specified in terms of having the right people with the right skills with the right amount of time working project. Linear responsibility chart is a brilliant planning tool. It's a first class communication tool. It is my favorite tool. And all you need to do is a large sheet of paper, some colored pens, a ruler, you can do it on a spreadsheet. You Do it using your favorite drawing tools or your favorite presentation software.

It's a really good