Project Roles

Roles Within Project Teams

For a team to work effectively, they need clearly defined roles, and individuals need to be empowered to fulfil these roles.

Project Manager (PM)

• Budget holder


• Owns overall project plan with timescales, deliverables & outcomes.


• Understands high level project progress and issues


• Provides environment to enable team to deliver


• Shields team from details of the business and politics.


• Deals with resourcing requirements


• Represents the project to senior management


• Works with Development Managers and Dev Leads to pull together the required proposition and take it into delivery if appropriate.

Empowerment Required: Demand that their outcomes are achieved by the dev team.

Team Leader

• People manager with technical background


• Runs sessions (eg standup, retrospective, planning)


• Supports and enforces development process by dealing with
  
  
  
  • people management
  
  
  • planning
  
  
  • progress measurment
  
  
  • external relationships
  
  
  • company politics
  
  
  • communication channels
  
  


• Works closely with dev team - especially Team Leader


• Attends relevant external meetings on behalf of team


• Ensures that the team operates smoothly, and have the tools & resource to deliver the project outcomes.


• Deals with issues that need resolving within and outside the team.


• Understands the technical details more than PM, but not to the depth of the senior developers.

Empowerment Required:

• Represents team


• Authority figure within team


• Runs project day-to-day


• PM primarily interacts with team via Team Leader.

Truth

• Provides the single point of requirements for the development team.


• Is able to answer all questions relating to requirements in a timely manner.


• Is available to the team at all times.

Empowerment Required:

• Authority to answer questions on requirements.


• Authority to make judgement calls on-the-spot.


• Empowered to commit all their time to the project and team.


• One Source for project requirements.

Lead Tester (QA)

• Works closely with Truth and Developers to understand requirements and provide acceptance tests, both manual and automated.


• Runs tests and sign off each story, iteration and release.


• Raises bugs.

Empowerment Required

• The acceptance tests they create are the single source of the requirements.


• If Truth is unavailable within acceptable timeframe, has authority to make the decision.


• Power to sign-off or reject stories, iteration and releases.

Marketing/Business

• Combines business knowledge and market research to generate initial high-level ideas, outcomes and goals.


• Sells the idea to the business and gets budget allocated to programme.


• Understands the long-term plan


• Generates the outcomes that are passed to the project team to fulfil.


• Understands how the outcomes fulfil the business requirements

Empowerment Required: To demand that their outcomes are achieved.

Technical Lead (Coach)

• The most senior developer on the team


• Takes responsibility for technical decisions on the project in conjunction with Architecture and other departments.


• Responsible for the technical output of the team, and ensuring that it complies with both internal and industry standards and best practices.


• Responsible for ensuring that the technical practices that support the process are implemented within the team eg Test Driven Development, Pairing, Continuous Integration.


• Works as a developers, providing coaching in Agile practices and coding.


• Works closely with Team Leader.

Empowerment Required: Empowered to make the technical decisions.
Empowered to use best practices and apply both internal and industry standards.

Developer

• Understands and embraces the Agile process, its benefits and core practices


• Is able to produce good quality, well designed code in response to stories


• Participates well within the team, adopts all required practices and attends all sessions.


• Works closely with Tester (QA) on Story


• Recognises the authority and expertise of Technical Lead (Coach) and uses them appropriately.