Project Team Roles and Responsibilities

Abstract

Without a doubt the human role is an inseparable part of the Project Management. Hiring and involving the right people who will be committed throughout the whole Project Life Cycle is of critical importance. Thus Organizational Planning and Staff Acquisition play an important role within Project Human Resources Management as their final output significantly effects project overall performance. The outputs consists of, among others:

• Identifying stakeholders
• Selecting a Project Team
• Assigning proper roles and responsibilities to everyone involved

The last one is a process of defining who does what (roles) and who decides what (responsibilities) and it is considered to be a solid foundation of every project and therefore - to be successfully executed. It should always link to the Project Scope baseline, defined as "work required to output a project’s deliverable", hence nothing is omitted as well as just value adding deliverables are performed. This is why it is essential to clearly allocate roles and define responsibilities for everyone within Project Team already from the very beginning of the Project Life Cycle, namely the Initial Phase (?).

This article focuses on the method of assigning roles and responsibilities to the Project Team members and applying adequate tools to ensure it is preserved and maintained properly during the Project Life Cycle. The objective of the article is to provide project managers with instructions and application-ready templates. For superior understanding, methodology described in the article applies to a medium size projects and refers to the leading pharmaceutical industry best practices.

Background

In sake Provide relevant definitions

• Project Life Cycle -
• Project Team - a group of people created for a sole purpose of performing a certain project within its life cycle. The team is disbanded once the project is completed.
• Project Scope - a work required to output a project’s deliverable successfully.
• Project Human Resources Management -

Motivation

Big idea: describe the tool, concept or theory and explain its purpose. The section should reflect the current state of the art on the topic Is the argument clear? Is there a logical flow to the article? Does one part build upon the other? Is the article consistent in its argument and free of contradictions?

It is project managers' role to build a Project Team and assign roles and responsibilities to its members. There are multiple reasons why project managers should cautiously perform this steps.

Intro: A project size needs to be defined prior to selecting who should be a part of a project as well as allocating roles and responsibilities due to an influence that it has during project life cycle. In pharmaceutical company best practices a project size is defined based on spend:

• Small
• Medium > 10 mln DKK < 100 mln DKK
• Large > 100 mln DKK

The article focuses on medium projects.

Project Team roles and responsibilities

Based on Harvard Business Review, when project manager is managing a project, the right people need to be on board to meet project objectives. Moreover, those people need to have a clear understanding of what their roles and responsibilities are. When it comes to a medium and large size projects, where more people need to be involved, therefore Project Team is respectively more extensive rather than in small projects where some roles can be omitted. Regarding to the pharmaceutical best practices terminology, Project Organization is an equivalent of Project Team and consists of:

• Project owner
• Steering committee
• Reference group - optional
• Project manager
• Project members

Tools Application

Application: provide guidance on how to use the tool, concept or theory and when it is applicable

Responsibility Assignment Matrix

Responsibility Assignment Matrix is a tool which visualizes assigned roles and responsibilities and as a result, makes it being transparent for everyone engaged. Its layout depends on a project size. In lower-level projects roles and responsibilities are assigned individually to each of the Project Team members. Nevertheless, the larger a project is the more people need to be involved. Thus, in larger-level projects roles and responsibilities are assessed to groups of people rather than to the individuals.

Project Team Charter

Organizational Breakdown Structure (OSB)

Limitations

Limitations: critically reflect on the tool/concept/theory and its application context. What can it do, what can it not do? Under what circumstances should it be used, and when not? How does it compare to the “status quo” of the standards – is it part of it, or does it extent them? Discuss your article in the context of key readings / resources provided in class. Substantiate your claims with literature

Summary

Quality of the summary: Does the summary make the key focus, insights and/or contribution of the article clear?

Bibliography

Provide key references (3-10), where a reader can find additional information on the subject. The article MUST make appropriate references to the reference material provided in class – either incorporating it as a source, or critically discussing aspects that are missing from it but covered by this article. Summarize and outline the relevance of each reference to the topic (around 100 words per reference). The bibliography is not counted in the suggested 3000 word target length of the article.