RACSI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Support, Informed)

RACSI — also written RASCI — is a responsibility-assignment matrix that extends the classic RACI model with a fifth role: Support. The four inherited roles keep their meaning. Responsible parties do the work; one Accountable person owns the outcome; Consulted parties give input before the work is done; Informed parties are kept up to date. The addition is Support: people who actively help the Responsible parties carry out the task — providing resources, tools, hands-on assistance, or capacity — as distinct from Consulted advisors, who only contribute opinion or expertise. The letters RACSI and RASCI describe the same five roles in a slightly different order; both denote Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Support, and Informed. Like RACI, it is laid out as a grid of tasks against roles, with one letter marking each person's relationship to each task.

RACSI exists because plain RACI lumps two different kinds of contribution into one bucket. In RACI, anyone who is not Responsible, Accountable, or merely Informed tends to land in Consulted — but there is a real difference between someone you ask for advice and someone who actually rolls up their sleeves to help get the work done. RACSI separates those: Consulted is advisory and two-way in dialogue; Support is hands-on and active in execution. Naming Support explicitly is valuable when delivery depends on enabling functions — a shared services team, a platform group, an agency, or specialists who do not own the task but materially help complete it. By giving those helpers their own role, RACSI prevents them from being mislabeled as advisors and makes their contribution visible in the plan.

The whole point of RACSI is the contrast with RACI, so it is worth being precise. RACI has four roles and one of them, Consulted, absorbs everyone whose involvement is not doing, owning, or being informed. That works until a task genuinely relies on people who help execute rather than just advise — and then RACI either miscategorizes them as Consulted or leaves them off entirely. RACSI fixes this by splitting that grey zone into two clean roles: Consulted for input and advice, Support for active help with the work. Everything else is identical, including the single-Accountable rule, which RACSI preserves unchanged: one and only one person owns each task. So RACSI is best thought of as RACI plus a helper role, not a different philosophy.

Which to use is a judgment about how much the support distinction matters for your work. If delivery is mostly self-contained within the responsible team, RACI's four roles are simpler and cleaner, and adding Support just clutters the grid. If delivery leans heavily on enabling teams, vendors, or shared resources whose help you want to name and coordinate, RACSI earns its extra column by making that help explicit and accountable to the plan. The trade-off is the usual one in role frameworks: more roles mean more precision but more overhead. Many teams default to RACI and reach for RACSI only on programs where support resources are central enough that leaving them unnamed would create real coordination gaps.

Using RACSI well means applying the same discipline as RACI — one Accountable per task, no orphans, no double owners — while reserving the Support role for genuine hands-on helpers, not as a dumping ground for anyone vaguely involved. Be strict about the Consulted-versus-Support line: if a person gives advice before the work, they are Consulted; if they actively help do the work, they are Support. Keep the grid legible by not over-marking; a row with five Supports and six Consulted usually signals a process that is too crowded rather than a matrix that is too detailed. As with any responsibility matrix, fill it in collaboratively, keep it visible, and update it when scope or staffing changes.

The failures mirror RACI's, with one addition. Beyond the classic traps — more than one Accountable, owner-less tasks, confusing Responsible with Accountable — RACSI invites the error of blurring Consulted and Support so the new role adds noise instead of clarity, and the error of reaching for RACSI's extra complexity on simple work that RACI would handle cleanly. The discipline is to use Support only where active help genuinely needs naming, to keep the Consulted-versus-Support distinction sharp, and otherwise to treat RACSI exactly like RACI — a shared, maintained map of responsibility with a single owner for every task.

RACSI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Support, Informed), also written RASCI, is a RACI variant that adds a Support role for active helpers while keeping the single-Accountable rule.

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