Hey all, Any tips, pointers, guidance on creating a RACI matrix for platform engineering. We are trying to figure out the boundaries around what platform team does vs what app dev team does. I have a broad idea, but if there is any detailed template or example available, I’d love to look at it

RACI between platform and customer facing teams is an interesting topic! Most of the companies I’ve worked for subscribe to the “build it you run it” idea which I’m a fan of to a point. In these same companies customer facing product teams often drown in work to adopt and upgrade platform tech, more often than not it gets done slow or not at all and the platform team doesn’t have the impact it need. A company I was at put a strict requirement for Customer facing teams to adopt everything which had a poor outcome - with teams splitting their time 20% customer facing work 80% platform adoption. As a platform team our ultimate goal is to give customer facing teams more bandwidth to try more ideas with customers. The more ideas they can try the more likely they are to succeed. Your RACI made to have a lot of nuance to it in some areas. For example in the scenario above I spun up an adoption team who were able to migrate 30 teams in roughly 9 months ad ease the burden of those teams. The adoption team had several approaches they would take with a team. 1. Educate and help them plan the work, 2. Educate and augment their team to do the work 3. Do the work for the team and educate the after. We had a set of guidelines to figure out which approach we took. I could talk for ages about this topic 😆 my suggestion is to be careful with RACI there’s a risk it establishes unrealistic obligation that never get met and cause more tension and work against the goals of what a platform team.

Yeah, we did approach 3 to find out the education after is not happening unless we put together a strict RACI 😄

I think a RACI per engagement model would be the right level of granularity. When we would run engagements we would have a kick off session and establish these expectations and explain the rationale as well a probe for anything risk that might make the engagement model in practical for the team we were helping. I would also make sure to set the expectation up the chain as well.

Thanks @Wayne Allan , this makes sense. We have a few different operational and support tasks where multiple teams are involved. Establishing and socializing when and how these teams are engaged so what I’m trying to establish