Distribution and Balance of Project Team Roles

The distribution of roles in a project team is one of the most important factors for the success of the entire project. Let's discuss what roles exist, how to choose the most appropriate employees to fulfill them, and how to make sure the decision you make is the right one.

Manager's Tasks in Creating a Project Team

We talked in detail about what a project team is and how it differs from a department, a task force or a simple group of employees in the article on project team management. Here is a brief summary of its main theses:

1. A project team is formed to achieve a certain goal and may include employees who do not typically interact with each other.
2. Most often such groups are created on a temporary basis, and once the project is completed, they are disbanded.
3. The less the specialists have to be distracted from their immediate duties (for example, to harmonize communication with each other, to discuss areas of responsibility, etc.), the better.

Ultimately, the task of the project team leader is to ensure that the team members are able to work as they normally would, without having to deal with strange feelings of newness of the project team, unfamiliar tasks, and so on. This is exactly what a clear distribution of roles helps to achieve.

Project Team Structure: Roles, Responsibilities, Goals

The roles of the project team members give you and other employees somewhat of a reference point: you immediately understand who's responsible for what, who makes what decisions, who should be contacted and on what issues. The composition and balance of roles within the project team is determined based on the specifics of the project, but as a rule, the main roles in the project team look like this:

Project Manager

Project manager is a leader who is responsible for the success of the overall project. The manager performs the following tasks:

• project planning;
• strategy development and approval;
• task allocation;
• resource management;
• team motivation;
• project monitoring.

Managing a project is a more complex task than managing a standard department of a company; after all, you need to build processes from scratch. To make things easier for yourself, you could study the PMBOK – a comprehensive body of knowledge on project management – and try to automate as much as you can.

For example, Kickidler Project Tracking can already take away most of your burden by:

• helping you manage projects and epics;
• generating analytical reports on projects;
• showing summaries of employee productivity and workload;
• displaying information on applications and websites used by employees (very helpful in finding procrastinators and optimizing processes);
• highlighting the distribution of efforts of project team members with the help of its Attention Focus feature.

The more proactive you are in using this project management software, the more time and attention you will have freed up for more important strategic tasks.

Project Customer

If the manager is in charge of the project, the customer is the person who initiates it. As a rule, this person is a client, a superior manager, a colleague from a concurrent department – meaning it’s someone who will be receiving the result from your team. Their tasks are:

• making and approving key business decisions;
• agreeing and allocating the budget;
• presenting and justifying project objectives.

Usually, the customer is not a member of the project team directly, but they still work closely with the project manager and can participate in high-level planning.

Business Analyst

Business analyst is a specialist who makes sure that the project objectives are in line with the actual needs of the customer. Their tasks are:

• collecting data from the end users of the project;
• helping to define the project concept, participating in goal setting;
• documenting specific business and technical requirements;
• testing the finished solutions.

Often a business analyst is involved in the project team temporarily, during the project initiation and planning stage.

Specialists

These are line employees who will perform tasks within the project within their respective areas of expertise – developers, designers, marketing specialists, etc. All they have to do is provide their own expertise as part of achieving the overall goals - and you need to create the conditions for this.

Keep in mind that project roles in a team might entail two types of collaboration:

• full-time project work: the person is placed fully under your management;
• part-time employment: the specialist is assigned to the project as a “reinforcement,” their employment on the project is temporary or partial.

One of the roles of the project team leader is to determine in advance the actual demands: who is needed full-time, and who can be engaged part-time, on a temporary basis. Using a task scheduler – such as the Gantt chart in Kickidler Project Tracking – can help with that.

Remember that preparing your project team and assigning roles properly is half the battle. The more transparent you make these roles, the clearer you differentiate their duties and responsibilities, the more effective the work will be. Pay as much attention to planning as possible, and you will be pleasantly surprised by the results!