When people work in teams, confusion about who does what, where decisions get made, and who needs to be kept in the loop can creep in and spoil the fun.
Have you ever had to sit through a meeting having no idea why you were invited? …or have you ever sent an email To: multiple people asking for a decision because you weren’t sure exactly who should make the call? …or received an email that was sent To: multiple people and felt you just HAD to respond, but really the sender was only intending to keep you in the loop?
CAIRO Can Help
CAIRO is an acronym. The letters stand for: Consulted, Accountable, Informed, Responsible, and Omitted.
To build your own CAIRO matrix and start to clear things up, try this:
- Identify and list all of the processes and activities that surround a project or team – one per row.
- List the people or roles involved – one per column.
- For each process or activity mark down who the ‘R’ is. There can only be one. If there’s more than one, try breaking the activity into smaller activities.
- Determine who are Accountable to the Responsible person for getting all or parts of the actual work done.
- Then determine who needs to be Consulted and who needs to be Informed. Consulted parties provide input, unlike Informed parties who are silent.
- Finally, and sometimes this is the tricky part, determine who explicitly will be Omitted. These are people that don’t need to be involved in any way.
The resulting chart is simple, but forcing yourself to think about which letter to assign to everyone for each item will require some thinking and may even stir some debate.
An Example
Try not to get hung up on the details of whether or not this is the right way to assign roles and responsibilities. This example shows an IT organization with activities surrounding the acquisition of hardware for a development team.
To add some color the above matrix, here are a few descriptive paragraphs:
The Director of IT is Responsible for ordering workstations for developers. Although he is ultimately accountable to his boss (**), the Chief Technology Officer for this, the buck stops at the Director of IT when it comes to decisions about the ordering of workstations.
The Director of IT has asked Systems Support to actually carry out the work, so they are Accountable to the Director of IT for ordering workstations for developers.
When workstations are ordered, the Systems Support team is sure to Consult with the project manager to time the order and delivery with the schedules of developers that need them. In addition, the developers are Informed when workstations are ordered.
The COO and Board of Directors are not kept in the loop about developer workstation orders. They are explicitly Omitted from communications relating to the ordering of workstations for developers.
The result of doing this with your team is that everyone will know their role and have a clear understanding of what’s expected of them in terms of team communication. In addition to this, everyone will know what everyone else’s level of involvement is for each activity.