DACI is a decision-making framework that assigns four roles to clarify who does what when a team needs to make a choice: Driver, Approver, Contributor, and Informed. It’s used in project management and organizational governance to prevent the all-too-common situation where everyone weighs in but nobody actually owns the decision.
The Four Roles Explained
Each letter in DACI represents a distinct role with a specific level of authority. Understanding the boundaries between them is the entire point of the framework.
- Driver: The person responsible for moving the decision forward. The Driver gathers information, corrals stakeholders, defines the scope of the decision, and makes sure it gets made by a deadline. Think of this person as the project manager of the decision itself. They don’t make the final call, but nothing happens without them pushing it along.
- Approver: The one person who actually makes the decision. This is the most important distinction in DACI: only one person should hold this role for any given decision. The Approver isn’t a passive rubber stamp. They actively weigh the input from Contributors, consider tradeoffs, and commit to a direction.
- Contributors: People with relevant expertise who provide recommendations and input. Contributors have a voice but not a vote. A software architect weighing in on a platform choice, a finance lead reviewing budget implications, or a designer offering UX perspective would all be Contributors. Their job is to inform the Approver’s thinking, not to reach consensus.
- Informed: People who will be affected by the decision and need to know the outcome, but who don’t participate in making it. They have no vote and no voice in the process. Once the Approver decides, the Driver communicates the result to this group.
How To Set Up a DACI
Start by framing the decision as a specific question. Atlassian’s team playbook recommends using the format “DACI: [Question we’re trying to answer]?” rather than a vague topic. “DACI: Which analytics platform should we adopt for Q3?” is far more useful than “DACI: Analytics.” A precise question keeps everyone focused on the same outcome.
Next, assign exactly one Driver and one Approver. List your Contributors by name, and identify who belongs in the Informed group. Put all of this in a shared document or collaboration tool where the team can see it. The format is typically a simple table: the decision question at the top, with each role and the names assigned to it listed below.
From there, the Driver runs the process. They schedule meetings or async check-ins, collect input from Contributors, present options and tradeoffs to the Approver, and set a timeline. Once the Approver makes the call, the Driver communicates it to everyone in the Informed group.
When DACI Works Best
DACI is most useful for decisions that involve multiple stakeholders with different perspectives, where it’s unclear who has final authority. Product launches, vendor selections, organizational restructuring, technology migrations, and cross-functional initiatives are all good candidates. If a decision only involves one person or one team, DACI adds unnecessary overhead.
The framework shines in environments where decisions stall because too many people feel entitled to a veto, or where decisions get revisited repeatedly because affected parties weren’t looped in. By explicitly separating “voice” (Contributors) from “vote” (Approver), DACI gives people a structured way to contribute without turning every decision into a committee negotiation.
How DACI Differs From RACI
If you’ve encountered RACI before, DACI will look familiar. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. The key difference is emphasis. RACI is typically used to assign responsibility for tasks and deliverables across a project. DACI is specifically designed for decisions.
In RACI, the “Responsible” person does the work, and the “Accountable” person answers for the outcome. In DACI, the Driver manages the decision process, and the Approver makes the final call. The practical effect is that DACI puts a sharper spotlight on who has decision-making authority, which matters most in situations where the real bottleneck isn’t getting work done but getting a clear “yes” or “no.”
Where DACI Breaks Down
The framework has a clean logic on paper, but teams run into real problems in practice. The most common failure: decisions that affect people who weren’t included in the process. If someone with enough organizational power to override the decision wasn’t listed as a Contributor or Approver, they may reverse the outcome after the fact, undermining the entire exercise.
Assigning multiple Drivers is another frequent mistake. Some teams try to share the Driver role to be collaborative, but this reliably leads to dropped balls. If it could be any one of three people pushing the decision forward, it often ends up being none of them. Decisions can be handed off from one Driver to another over time, but at any given moment, exactly one person should own it.
There’s also a risk of the framework becoming bureaucratic. For fast-moving teams or innovation-oriented decisions that don’t fit neatly into standard processes, a formal DACI assignment can slow things down rather than speed them up. The framework works best when applied selectively to decisions that genuinely need role clarity, not as a blanket requirement for every choice a team faces.
Making It Stick
The single most important rule is keeping the Approver role to one person. The moment you assign two Approvers, you’ve recreated the ambiguity DACI was supposed to eliminate. If two senior leaders both need to sign off, pick one as the Approver and list the other as a Contributor whose input carries significant weight. The Approver can absolutely defer to a Contributor’s expertise, but the structural clarity of one decision-maker prevents deadlocks.
Equally important: communicate roles before the process starts, not midway through. Everyone should know whether they’re being asked to contribute input or simply be notified. Contributors who think they’re Approvers will feel overruled. Informed stakeholders who think they’re Contributors will feel ignored. Setting expectations upfront is what turns DACI from a theoretical exercise into a tool that actually reduces friction.