Project Team Roles

Overview

When working on your team, it’s important to verbalize what role you plan to take in your team. This is to ensure that everyone in your team understands what their responsibilities are and have a clear understanding of what to take on themselves versus what they should delegate. This is also a great way to simulate a team leadership environment that can help each of you build leadership experience and learn what it's like to work with a team of people in an organized manner.

Team Role Ideas

Note: every team is different, so some of these roles will be relevant or irrelevant depending on the type of project your team has taken on. The main piece of advice is to avoid overcomplicating roles. Keep it simple, to the point, and not so fine-grained that it causes in confusion.

With that being said, here's some of the most common team roles:

• Project Manager: facilitates communication between project subteams and with club leadership and manages team meetings. (MANDATORY)
• Sub-Team Leads: represents their sub-team during team meetings, applicable for larger teams of 7-8 (if team is large enough).
  • For ex. if front-end/back-end team has 3+ people, then it might be a good idea to have a lead for these sub-teams to serve as a point of contact.
• Regular Team Member: standard team member, and if there are sub-teams, they are part of a specific sub-team. (MANDATORY)

Note: Project Managers and Sub-Team Leads are also technically Regular Team Members as well, so there will definitely be some overlapping responsibilities that are relevant to them. Please avoid just being the person that tells people what to do, because that is not leadership and you get no learning from doing that.

Project Manager Responsibilities

• Organizes and leads weekly project meetings outside of general club meetings
• Facilitates discussion during team meetings and syncs up with each subteam on their responsibilities
• Facilitates the division of project-wide tasks amongst team members or subteams.
• Ensures that team members are in sync with project goals and expectations.
• Serves as a point of contact for the team and keeps open lines of communication with club staff
• Maintains accountability for completing project-wide tasks across the team by following up with members on completing their tasks
  • If there are subteams within a project, this responsibility is also inherited by subteam leads for smaller subteam-level tasks:
• Encourages team participation in the project and drives project progress by:
  • Setting project milestones
  • Setting tentative deadlines to complete tasks
  • Follow up with team members to plan the best course of action to maintain productivity
  • Maintain team-wide dedication and enthusiasm toward reaching project completion.

Sub-Team Lead Responsibilities

Note: This is an optional role and only recommended if your subteam has 3+ people. The most common subteam types are front-end, back-end, and sometimes database management depending on how complicated it is to query and store the data. Otherwise, it really depends on your team project.

• Works with the subteam to create short-term goals and tasks
  • For ex. the front-end team has needs to finish the home page and debug the login page by end of week before moving on to implementing other main features
• Maintains accountability by following up with members on completing their tasks, which can be passed down from PM if need be
• Facilitate discussion with other sub-team members and make decisions on how tasks within the subteam scope will be divided.
• Actively communicate important updates and changes with other sub-teams
• During weekly meetings, report a summary of last week’s progress (i.e. what has been done, potential setbacks, plans for next week) to the project manager and other team members status updates
• Provide help when sub-team members have specific coding questions or other concerns related to the project Manage sub-team backlog and manage/facilitate pull requests reviews

Regular Team Member Responsibilities:

• Actively participate in the completion of the project by:
  • Sharing ideas or unique perspectives during team meetings
  • Completing individual tasks as delegated by the deadline (or communicating with team leads in advance for any potential time conflicts or concerns)
  • Maintaining good communication with other team members
  • Keeping the team on track by helping to avoid distractions
  • Be mindful of merge conflicts and communicate with the full team before making new changes.
• Sync up with the project manager or sub-team leads, and inform the team of roadblocks, conflicts, or concerns. Be proactive, not reactive!