Fill four roles on every task, so no work sits without an owner

Where the idea came from

Robb Lejuwaan's wife was working on a launch plan for a business. She sat in a room with 30 people. They planned the whole launch event right there.

Here's how Robb put it:

"That RACI model was at the core of what they were doing, and they were able to plan a full launch in a room with thirty people using that model."

RACI is four letters. Each one asks one question:

• R is for Responsible. Who does the work?
• A is for Accountable. Who answers for it and sets the date?
• C is for Consulted. Who do you ask before you start?
• I is for Informed. Who do you tell when it's done?

When Robb heard that, he thought about our fleet:

"Oh my gosh, we don't have all of that in our fleet system. We need to have that in our fleet system, right? This is crazy."

What we found when we looked

Our fleet is a team of AI agents (AI programs that each do a job on their own). Each agent is a desk with one job. One does SEO (helping people find us on Google). Others do security or engineering. They hand work to each other on cards. A card is one task on a shared board.

That same day, Robb kept finding work nobody had picked up:

"I ran into multiple examples today of things that needed to be done that hadn't been assigned. Those four elements had not been defined."

Here are three of them.

1. A new project nobody told SEO about. We started a new project. Our SEO desk's own rules say every new project gets its SEO checklist on day one. But nobody told the SEO desk the project was there.

"The SEO desk didn't even know that it had any work assigned to it on the project. Didn't even know the project was there."

The rule was fine. Nobody had the job of passing on the news.

2. An old price in 8 places. On Oct 18, Robb stopped selling one of our offers. Eleven days later, 8 of our desks' instruction files still listed the old price. Fixing them was nobody's job, so nobody fixed them.

3. A form that sat for 11 days. Our security desk found an old web form on a site we look after that should have come down long ago. On day one the problem got an owner: the desk that answers for that site. But taking the form down needed someone who could get into an old site builder. Nobody was named to do it. It was 11 days before we knew it was gone.

Margo, our security desk, summed it up in one line: "An A without an R is a card that ages."

The pattern

No agent was lazy or broken here. Each case had a rule, an owner, or both. Each one was missing one of the four roles.

• The new project had a rule. Nobody was named to tell the SEO desk. That's a missing I.
• The old price had a clear call from Robb. Nobody was named to carry it out. That's a missing R.
• The form had someone who answered for it, an A. Nobody was named to do the work. Another missing R.

AI agents move fast on work they know is theirs. They don't go looking for work that has no name on it.

What we changed

Some of this is live now. The rest starts next week.

Live since Thu Oct 29:

• When a project starts, its desk tells our 7 shared desks that same day. Those are SEO, marketing, content, ads, security, compliance (checks we follow the rules) and systems (the desk that checks every rule change). Each one adds the project to its own instructions.
• SEO work now has its four roles filled. The SEO desk plans it. Each project's own desk builds it. Each project's manager owns the dates and the weekly target.
• Some questions wait on Robb for over an hour. If one isn't his kind of call, it now goes to a group of four. 3 of the 4 votes decide. That morning, about 71 of 168 waiting questions weren't his kind of call. We wrote up how too much work reached him in this log entry.

Starting Mon Nov 2: each business gets one RACI page. It has about 12 rows, one for each kind of work. The first business goes Monday. Every other project follows that week.

Here's one row, for the SEO work on that new project:

How to check your own fleet

1. Pick 5 open tasks.
2. Write down the R, A, C and I for each one.
3. Any blank is a task that will sit. Fill it in today.
4. When a new project starts, list who needs to know. Tell them that same day.
5. When you make a decision, name who carries it out. A decision with no R is a note. Nothing changes.

Where this fits

We didn't add a new belief for this. It sits under our first one: systems thinking (looking at how all the parts work together) is the foundation of a healthy fleet. See what we believe. For a related lesson, read why agents can't fix their own problems.

Our fleet is a system. A task with no name on it is a hole in the system. The agents go right around it.