Project management best practices: Project team responsibilities

In a project team for a bigger project people have several roles:

• Developer: at makandra
• Project lead: at makandra
• Project manager (PM): at makandra, external, or with the customer. In a smaller project this person is also the project lead.
• Product owner (PO): with the customer

Developer

• Development
• Take responsibility for their stories. This includes always gathering all necessary information from the project lead or the PM, communicate blockers, make sure stories are merged, deployed etc.
• Tell the project lead, if you're going to be out of work.

Project lead

• Project lead is primarily responsible for the successful completion of the project.
• Organizes the development.
• Makes sure all developers have enough work. Sometimes assigns specific stories to specific developers.
• Organize a daily stand-up.
• Have control over the story tracker.
• Prepare and clarify stories with the PM.
• Keep an overview over all deadlines and the budget.
• Makes key decisions about architecture and technologies.
• Makes the final decision when no consensus can be reached in a technical argument (e.g. in code reviews).

The project lead can delegate parts of the project to a developer, who then takes responsibility for that part and takes over part of the project leads job in that regard.

In bigger teams, the project lead should try to assign topics to developers in such a way to avoid that unnecessarily many people have to be familiar with a specific topic.

Project manager

• Not responsible for any technical aspects of the project
• Requirement engineering with the customer
• Create stories with the project lead
• Communicate with the customer, including tunneling questions of developers (or have them talk to the customer directly, if required)
• Timely acceptance of stories, if necessary together with the product owner.

If we have a dedicated internal PM, we should still treat them like an external PM. They are responsible for all PM work, but not primarily responsible for budgets, dead lines etc. This responsibility always lies with the project lead.

Product Owner

• Clarification of requirements with the PM
• Acceptance of stories with the PM (if necessary)