altigad.
A mid-size research organization ran its client lifecycle across 92 steps and seven departments. Accountability was assigned in a standard operating procedure — but the way R and A roles were distributed didn't follow how the client actually moved through the system.
Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed — the four roles a person can hold on any one step of a process. Chart them across a whole workflow and you see who owns what, where it fails, and why.
Each frame is one client engagement, step by step; the colours show which department holds R and A at each one. Instead of a smooth path around the organization, responsibility hops back and forth — loops, gaps, and departments re-entering the process in ways that make little sense from the client's side. 18 seconds, anonymized: the pattern of accountability, not the client's data.
On paper it looked fine. In motion it didn't. Charted against the lifecycle, responsibility and accountability jumped and skipped between departments instead of following a clear circle of handoffs. Teams were told they owned steps that didn't line up with where the client actually was. Other steps had no logical owner at all.
Because the RACI didn't follow the client, frontline teams were living inside contradictions. A project manager would be Accountable on steps where they had no visibility. A department would lose ownership just as the hardest work started.
The visual matched what they already felt. It gave them language for it.
Seeing it made the redesign simple to talk about:
- Draw the lifecycle as the client experiences it
- Map a continuous R/A path around the departments
- Limit ownership changes to intentional, visible handoffs instead of jumps
Adding and subtracting steps became a way to calibrate the client experience rather than an argument about territory.
Accountability that doesn't follow the client isn't accountability. It's a diagram everyone has agreed to stop reading.