What is RACI matrix in project management?

The Requirement Traceability Matrix (RTM) is the documents that set the foundation for project life cycle. It helps to assign roles and responsibility to each stake holder involved in the project development life cycle. It is the most reliable tool which helps to kickstarts of the project with requirement gathering and managing them through various phases of project development life cycle. It ensures that the requirements are determine correctly, monitored visibly & desired outcome is met to achieve the project goal.

The main intent of Requirement Traceability Matrix is to identify the project stakeholder and list them as document with roles and responsibilities. It assists to gather business requirement correctly and list them as a document to ensure that single lead is also not skipped. If we skipped a single important requirement, it may cost us heavily in later part of the project with remodelling the project, delays and even non-success of project. RTM insured that all the requirements are identified and assist to minizine the risk of missing the important requirements. It helps project team to communicate with stake holder more effectively to document the requirement so that team and stake holder will be on same page. It assists team to take rational decision based on business need and prioritize the requirement by considering their importance for business team.

The real motive of RTM is to help project team understand their roles and responsibilities and deliver the task assigned to them in each step of project development life cycle. RTM is the main pillar of project which assure all requirement enforced as per the stakeholders intend and changes request are documented. The RTM deliver its objective by identifying each issue early in the project life cycle and help to resolve it so that project team able to track the progress of project. It RTM greatly assist project team by assuring that the project is on right tack to deliver project goal.

The RTM assure that requirements are crystal clear and coherent which help to develop error free and defect less final product by identifying the gap and inconsistencies in requirement and correct them before final project product delivery process gets complete. RTM assure that project team test each requirement and verify that all the requirements are tested. The RTM also assure that each test case meets the business requirement and the business end users are satisfied with the test result.

The RTM assist project team to handle the change request more effectively in an organized manner. It helps to identify in scope and out of scope change request.  It helps project team & business analyst to do the feasibility study and impact analysis to analyse the impact of change request on existing functionality of product as well as on an organization weather impact is positive or negative. The change request either can be approved or rejected based on feasibility study and impact analysis. If change request is approved by project manager, then changes will be implemented by tracking and managing changes to artifacts such as coding and testing the requirements. Once the change is completed then it is reported for evaluation to those who are responsible to managing the changes and it to stakeholder for review purpose.

In nutshell, the RTM is the tool that plays vital role for delivering the successful project outcome.