RACI Matrix

This matrix removes ambiguity about hand-offs. For each activity it names who is Responsible (does the work), Accountable (owns the outcome - exactly one per row), Consulted (gives input), and Informed (kept in the loop).

Legend: R Responsible · A Accountable · C Consulted · I Informed Roles: ST Stakeholders (Product Owner) · PM Project Manager · BA Business Analyst · SA Architect/Dev Lead · DEV Developer · CE Cloud Engineer (DevOps) · Q Quality Engineer (QC/QA/Test)

Two consolidations reflected here

Product accountability (the A for vision, backlog, and acceptance) sits with Stakeholders (ST). And QC, QA, and Tester are one role, shown as the single Q column.

Direction & planning

Activity	ST	PM	BA	SA	DEV	CE	Q
Set product vision & funding	A	C	I	I	I	I	I
Prioritize product backlog	A	C	C	C	I	I	I
Define roadmap & releases	A	C	C	C	I	C	I
Sprint Planning	A	C	R	R	R	R	R
Capacity & risk reporting	I	A	C	C	I	C	I

Definition & design

Activity	ST	PM	BA	SA	DEV	CE	Q
Gather & document requirements	A	I	R	C	I	I	C
Write acceptance criteria	A	I	R	C	I	I	C
Technical design & ADRs	I	I	C	A	C	C	C
Estimation	I	C	R	A	R	C	C
Set coding & quality standards	I	I	I	A	C	C	R

Build & verify

Activity	ST	PM	BA	SA	DEV	CE	Q
Implement features	I	I	C	C	A/R	I	C
Write unit tests	I	I	I	C	A/R	I	C
Provision & manage infrastructure (IaC)	I	I	I	C	C	A/R	I
IaC review & policy-as-code	I	I	I	C	C	A/R	C
CI/CD pipeline build & maintenance	I	I	I	A	C	R	C
Code review	I	I	I	C	C	C	A/R
Security & quality gates	I	I	I	C	R	R	A/R
Functional / regression / E2E tests	I	I	C	I	C	I	A/R
Defect triage	I	C	I	C	R	C	A/R

Release & improve

Activity	ST	PM	BA	SA	DEV	CE	Q
Sprint Review / demo	A	C	R	C	R	R	R
Accept / reject increment	A	I	C	I	I	I	C
Release / deploy to production	A	C	I	C	C	R	C
Monitoring, alerting & SLOs	I	I	I	C	C	A/R	C
Incident response & post-mortem	I	C	I	C	C	A/R	C
Retrospective & improvements	I	A	C	C	R	R	R
Stakeholder reporting	I	A	R	I	I	C	I

Note

Exactly one A per row is the discipline that makes RACI work. If two people think they own an outcome, the matrix is wrong - fix it in a pull request. Note that the A for product decisions sits with the client stakeholders, while EmeSoft holds the R for the work.

Data engineering - data projects only

Conditional

The activities below apply only on data-centric projects that staff a Data Engineer (DE). On a typical application-delivery project this table does not apply, and there is no DE in the matrix above.

Columns here: ST Stakeholders (PO) · BA Business Analyst · SA Architect/Dev Lead · CE Cloud Engineer (DevOps) · DE Data Engineer · Q Quality Engineer

Activity	ST	BA	SA	CE	DE	Q
Design data architecture & model	C	C	A	C	R	I
Build ingestion & ELT/ETL pipelines	I	C	C	C	A/R	I
Data quality, tests & contracts	I	C	C	I	A/R	C
Schema evolution & lineage	I	C	C	I	A/R	I
Data platform & pipeline CI/CD	I	I	C	A	R	I
Serve datasets to analytics / BI / ML	A	C	I	I	R	C

Hand-off flow

flowchart LR
    ST[Stakeholders / Product Owner] -->|vision, backlog| BA[Business Analyst]
    BA -->|ready stories| SA[Architect/Dev Lead]
    SA -->|designed tasks| DEV[Developer]
    DEV -->|PR| Q[Quality Engineer<br/>QC / QA / Test]
    Q -->|validated increment| CE[Cloud Engineer<br/>DevOps]
    CE -->|deployed & monitored| ST
    ST -->|demo & feedback| BA
    PM[Project Manager] -.->|orchestrates & reports across all| DEV