DACI and RACI for technical decisions: one approver, named contributors

What it is

Atlassian's DACI play defines four roles for a decision. The driver corrals stakeholders, collects information, sets the scope and gets the decision made by an agreed date. The approver is one person who makes the decision; the play stresses "one" so that approval is an active role rather than a rubber stamp. Contributors bring subject knowledge and recommendations: they have a voice, but not a vote. Informed people are affected by the outcome and are told once it is made. RACI, the older task-oriented matrix, is commonly described as assigning each activity someone responsible for doing it, exactly one person accountable for it, people consulted before and people informed after; it is a matrix over tasks rather than a process for one decision.

Why it matters

Technical decisions stall in two ways: nobody owns bringing them to a close, or everyone believes they hold a veto. Naming a driver fixes the first; naming a single approver fixes the second. Writing the roles down also tells contributors what their input is for, which lowers the temperature of the discussion.

How to apply

• For a decision with more than one team affected, open a page titled with the question, list D, A, C and I by name, and set a decision date. The driver owns the page.
• Pick the approver by who carries the consequence: the owner of the system that will run the result, not the most senior person present.
• Contributors write their recommendation and reasoning on the page before any meeting; the meeting is for disagreements, not for reading.
• Record the decision, the options rejected and why, in an architecture decision record; DACI ends when the ADR is written and the informed list has been notified.
• Use RACI instead when the problem is unclear ownership of recurring tasks (who rotates the certificates, who reviews dependency updates), not a one-off choice.

Pitfalls

Two approvers, or an approver who defers to a committee, reproduces the stall the framework exists to remove. A driver who is also the approver skips the information-gathering step. Contributors treated as voters produce lowest-common-denominator decisions. A RACI matrix with several "A"s per row, or with "C" on everyone, is decoration. Frameworks assign roles; they do not supply the judgement, and a decision recorded without its rationale will be re-litigated.