Getting the team roles right can create a dynamic, high-performing team culture. And, working in a high-performing team should be the goal of every Project Manager and team.

Team roles differ based on your project goals, solution, and approach. The Project size and number of staff required also will dictate the types and numbers of team roles. If the Project is simple and smaller, some roles may be consolidated. Larger projects may have more roles or more team members within a role. 

These variables impact the team roles, skills, styles mix on every Project. Let's break down the two most common Team Structures and discuss how they impact the Team Roles and Responsibilities.

The Agile Scrum Project Framework is a newer approach and has significant differences to the roles below. Agile Roles will be covered in a future post. 

The General Team Role Framework

Sub-Teams are used on larger projects to define tasks into smaller working groups with specific skills. Sub-teams often have their own team meetings, working sessions, and progress reporting. 

Sub-team reports are consolidated into the PMO’s Project reporting to the Project Manager, Sponsor, and Steering Committee. These sub-teams roles, responsibilities, and skills focus on a single aspect of the work to allow for more effective and efficient effort. Sub-teams generally have:

1. Role specialization with their subgroups and

2. Report to a Lead of the sub-team

3. Focus on an specific set of task types

   
   

Team Roles and Responsibilities - Skill Set driven

A Traditional team is a hierarchical top-down team run to maximize results on large and complex projects. These include projects with government oversight, regulatory requirements, and high capital investments where documentation milestones and process rigor is needed. 

The Sponsor's role is to act as the overall customer of the Project. They are responsible for:

• Ensuring the Project meets the needs of the organization

• The target user group's requirements are met, and the solution is adopted

• The Project Business Case Return on Investment (ROI) is realized

• The Project budget, solution, time requirements are within agreed metrics

• The Project outcome is compliant with policies and regulation

The Sponsor is a member of the steering committee and reports to senior management.

The Project Manager is the leader of the Project and oversees the execution of a project. They are responsible for:

• Managing project scope and deliverables, compliance with internal project processes

• Certifying adherence to staff management protocols

• Overseeing overall project scope, timelines, and budgets

• Ensuring the solution quality meet agreed expectations

• Managing direct reports and coaching as needed

• Assuring Compliance related to regulatory requirements

• Confirming project activities are executed correctly

The Project Manager reports to the Project Sponsor and the Steering Committee. And, if the Project Manager is an external contractor, they also have reporting lines to their own organization.  

See "The 7 Essential Leadership Skills" for more on the key skills needed for any Project Manager.

If you have questions about why and when Coaching versus Mentoring can help your team, go to my latest post on this topic.

Project Management Office (PMO) Lead  is responsible for:

• Consolidating cross Project processes

• Creating and distributing the Project Plan and staff updates

• Coordinating with the other leads to update the Project Plan

• Flagging issues in Scope or Timeline to the Project Manager and Sponsor

• Preparing special reports as needed for the Project

• Managing and Coaching the PMO team

This role reports to the Project Manager.

Communications is responsible for:

• Ensuring internal and external Project Communication planning and quality

• Creating managing and delivering Communication content for the Project

• Using the organization's communication protocols

• Controlling external communication from the Project Team

• Managing the Communication Project planning

This role reports to the PMO Lead. But may also report plans, progress, and results to the Project Manager and Project Sponsor. They may also report to the organization's communications group, external to the Project.  

Financial reporting is responsible for:  

• Managing the budget and cost actuals for the Project

• Calculating the cost and cost variances

• Addressing accounting issues

• Flagging Project under or overruns

• Creating the Financial DashBoard to the Project Manager and Sponsor

This role often reports directly to the Project Manager and Sponsor. And may have Financial group reporting lines outside of the Project.  

Training is responsible for:

• Designing, Creating, and delivering team training

• Onboarding team members with training for the Project and their role

• Ensuring that all team members have the training needed to execute their jobs

• Designing and creating End-User Training

• Running the Train-the-trainer event for user learning sessions

This role reports to the PMO Lead.

Project Support is responsible for:

• Maintaining project documents, including version control change requests

• Creating Project Internal process revisions

• Managing on and off-boarding staffing processes, such as badges, desk allocation, and time reporting

This role reports to the PMO Lead.

The Functional Team Lead is responsible for:

• Leading the solution design.

• Working closely with Users to define an operational process, product, or service, depending on the project goal.

• Coordinating the functional needs with the technical build team

• Ensuring the design is fit for the overall solution

• Managing and Coaching their team members.

This role reports to the Project Manager. 

The Business Analyst is responsible for:

• Defining the User Experience or solution functionality

• Designing the Solution Configuration or solution elements

• Documenting the Data Management or information elements

• Confirming to, or updating the Processes and Policies of the organization

• Defining the technical build requirements

This team may have sub-specialization for each area above or for areas such as system reporting, system processing, and system throughputs. This role reports to the Functional Team Lead. 

The Solution User is responsible for:

• Defining the their requirements

• Designing the solution to meet organizational goals

• Confirming build through testing and documenting findings

This team is often ‘on loan’ from the organization and has a dotted line reporting relationship to the Project Manager or Sponsor.

The Testing Team is responsible for:

• Designing and building test plans and scripts

• Executing functional testing of the solution

• Reporting on test results and accepting build components

This group may include business analysts and solution end-users. This role reports to the Functional Team Lead. Users may formally or informally report to the Project Sponsor.  

The Technical Team Lead. is responsible for:

• Leading the Technical solution design

• Working closely with the organization's technical team to align technology backbone and internal requirements

• Coordinating with the Functional Team lead

• Ensuring the technical design fits the overall solution

• Defining, installing, and maintaining the required infrastructure to support the solution

• Managing and Coaching their team members

This role reports to the Project Manager.  

The Build Team or Development is responsible for:

• Designing, building, and managing the technical solution

• Creating, running and results reporting for Technical testing of the solution

• Working with the Functional Team to confirm solution configuration, functional design specifications

• Working with users to test the data migration, as needed

• Solution testing the end-to-end product

• Planning the cutover go-live to the new solution

• Decommissioning of replaced technology, as needed

This role reports to the Technical Team Lead.

The Infrastructure Team is responsible for: 

• Designing, installing and maintaining the technology backbone: hardware, software, and connectivity are supported

• Ensuring all integration points work across the end-to-end solution

• Documenting the detailed infrasture map

• Planning and communicating the maintenance support scheduled

The Infrastructure team works closely with the Build team to ensure the technology can meet the needs of the Project and is performing to specifications. This role reports to the Technical Team Lead.

Team Roles and Responsibilities - Cross Functionally driven

A variation on the traditional team is the Matrix or Cross Functional team. 

The Project Roles are essentially the same as above. However, the working groups are defined not by role, or sub-team but by sub-Project teams. Serving as a cross-functional team has many benefits:

• a diverse perspective on solutioning.

• ability to focus on one specific outcome

• long-term working teams build rapport

Sub-Projects make sense where the Project has multiple components running in parallel.
A Project with independent task tracks can be managed in cross-functional teams until the moment of integration. This can be an effective way to manage a project where the teams are:

1. Designing a business process, and

2. Building a related technology solution, and

3. Creating a Service Center to support the service post-go-live

However, even within Sub-Project teams the functional areas need to maintain a consolidated way of working and work approach for consistency in work products.

Some may say this has multiple 'track’ project is actual a Program. That may be true, however, not all organizations make this distinction. And on occasion, a Project morphs into a Program as part of their maturity process. During this transitional period, cross-functional teams with the Project can work while a new organization is put together for the Program.

Either way, these sub-Project tracks are planned with separate tasks and deliverables, aligned and integrated through the work informally day-to-day. And more formally integrated at project milestones. In this case, the sub-Projects, not teams, hold working sessions, team meetings and produce status reports. Sub-teams often have team leads and may work using an Agile/Scrum approach. This works even if the rest of the Project uses waterfall or a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) approach.

Beyond Roles and Responsibilities

Teams need more than roles and responsibility clarity. They need trust, respect, a shared way of working and complimentary skills. Get more insights into Team Skills and Working Styles with the links below:

High Performing Teams

Project Skill Certification

Belbin Team Roles

What did you think? Are these traditional team roles ones you recognize from your Projects? Did you take another approach? Please share with the community in the comments below. Thanks!