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Project Team Roles

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Role Confusion

Around 1870 David Livingstone and his team of porters were clearing a path through the Congolese jungle with machetes, hoping to find the source of the Nile. The head porter's job was to manage - ensuring that machetes stayed sharp, the porters had enough water, and were generally able to continue clearing a path through the jungle.

Livingstone's job, as the leader, was to climb a tree and look around to make sure the jungle was being cleared in the right place.

This seperation between management and leadership seems distinct and obvious. And yet all too often we happily entrust the delivery of complex IT projects to project managers or customer representatives. Abdicating, say, the decision to use multi-factor authentication and claims-based authorization to a line manager is... unwise, most of the time.

Other team roles don't often fare better. Developers often test their own code without a test strategy, or the involvement or oversight of a tester. Network administrators decide on application security measures. Salesmen dictate project schedules, features and at the same time constrain budgets (see tradeoff triangles ).

It's surprising sometimes, that anything ships.

Team Roles

Below is a list of project team roles, loosely based on the MSF Team Model from 2003 (the MSF model a bit dated now, but still very relevant). The list contains my preferred approach to structuring a project team:

Product management

Goal: Satisfied customers.

Functional Areas		Responsibilities
Marketing		Develops and maintains the business case
Business value		Drives the project vision/scope
Customer advocate		Manages customer requirements
Product planning		Manages customer expectations
		Manages features/schedule/resources trade-off decisions
		Manages marketing and public relations
		Develops, maintains, and executes the communications plan
		Manages risk

Architecture

Goal: Delivering a successful solution within project constraints.

Functional Areas		Responsibilities
Technical leadership		Manages the product specification
Process assurance		Drives implementation of critical trade-off decisions
Quality assurance		Facilitates communication and negotiation within the team
		Develops the project schedule
		Develops, maintains, and executes the project plan
		Manages risk

Project Management

Goal: Managing solution delivery within project constraints.

Functional Areas		Responsibilities
Resource management		Manages development process to ship product on time
Project management		Maintains the project schedule
Administrative services		Reports project status
		Manages risk

Development

Goal: Build to specification.

Functional Areas		Responsibilities
Technology consulting		Specifies features of the physical design
Application development		Builds features
Infrastructure development		Builds and prepares solution and environment for deployment
Test planning		Develops test strategy and plan
Test engineering		Conducts testing

Team Size

The team roles should scale. This means that for larger projects, teams can be split into feature teams...

..or, for smaller projets, roles can be combined:

Prod.
Mgmt

Arch.

Proj.
Mgmt

Dev.

Test

Ops

Product Management

Architecture

Project Management

Development

User Experience

Test

Operations

Where P = possible, U = unlikely, and N = not.

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