Roles and Responsibilities

Expectations Engineering – IT branchen Roles and Responsibilities and Expectations Levels Roles and Responsibilities

Introduction to this module

A project is like a play in which all roles must be filled for the play to be performed properly. Some roles are big, some are small, but they are all important for the whole.

But projects often forget to fill important roles; and this gives the active “cast” extra, unforeseen work – which they must take on without preparation and perhaps even without the necessary competence.

Roles have to be defined and people must fill the roles. In the description of roles however, the focus is not on individual people, but on the roles in connection with product development and maintenance.

Learning objectives

In this module you will learn:

About the importance of defined roles
How defined roles support the project flow in critical times
What roles you should look for and consider

Rationales

There are two relevant rationales for this module:

Why are stakeholders so important? A forgotten stakeholder can end as an enemy for the project:

Why are requirement important:

Content

A company is a complex eco-system with an organizational structure designed to comply with the needs for information, work, and product flow. This structure is realized through a set of processes including procedures, methods, techniques, and tools. When roles are allocated to the procedures, and the knowledge and skills of employees satisfy the demands of the roles, the eco-system is able to work at it’s best

The filling of roles within an organizational structure of course varies a lot from company to company. One or more people may fill one role, just as one person may fill one or several roles. The definition of roles, including the distribution of the process activities on roles depends on the definition of the processes in the organization – and this will vary from company to company.

The organizational positioning of roles is another matter of difference from company to company. It is especially a question of where the responsibility is placed in relation to the customer, marketing, and supporting processes e.g. configuration management. Are these responsibilities placed on roles internal or external to the project?

To ensure success with roles it is very important to make it clear to everybody what each role needs from other roles, and what the role has to deliver to other roles. This is a matter of clarity as regards processes, responsibilities, and authorizations. A well-run organization is characterized by effective communication and a total awareness of who in the organization is the central person for which information.

Sources

This module relates very much to the module Stakeholders. Mainly because a project related role also is a stakeholder.

You can read more in the material for this module. Here you will find a large chapter about roles and responsibilities.

Here you also find the slides used for this module.

Definitions for the terms used in this module and more, can be found with this link: ISO/IEC/IEEE 24765:2017 .

Read about the Decision Analysis and Resolution process and its practices via this link: CMMI for Development version 1.3.

We strongly recommend that you get hold on the Chaos Report 2018 from Standish Group, (get it from your favourite source). It’s great stuff, and tells you that the faster you can make decisions, the better you perform. That sounds pretty obvious, but it reveals some very interesting facts that will change your focus. And one key to the solution is: surprise! Roles and responsibilities.

Summary

A stakeholder has a relation to the organization – a role. The role is responsible for some activities and the role has authority – all this has to be defined.

Definition of roles, their responsibilities and authorities makes it possible for the stakeholders and project participants to do their best.

You need the clearly defined roles most, when the unforeseen problems appear. Then it is great to know who can take care of what. Alternative you have to start up by finding someone to take care of it.