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 plays an important role within Project Human Resources Management as its final output significantly effects project overall performance. The output consists of, among others:

• Assigning roles and responsibilities to everyone involved, which 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.
• Selecting a Project Team and staffing management plan
• Creating an organizational chart

It shall always link to the Project Scope, 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.

Motivation

It is project managers' role to build a Project Team, adequately assign roles and responsibilities to its members and make sure everything established is clear for everyone throughout the Project Life Cycle. There are multiple reasons why project managers shall have a careful approach to those processes.

First of all, it is essential to define a project size beforehand to support effective project execution. The more people are needed on board, the more roles and responsibilities need to be allocated among them. There are a certain roles which shall be performed in medium and large projects but not necessarily in a small ones. This is also explained in detail further in the article.

Secondly, it happens that roles and responsibilities are assigned to people who do not have neither an interest nor a required knowledge or an experience to perform successfully. As a result, the project scope might become unsettled, deliverables might not be valueable as expected and in the end - a project might run behind a schedule.

Thirdly, transparency is a key for the Project Team to be effective. Once roles and responsibilities are assigned, project manager shall ensure everything is documented as well as transparent and clear for everyone involved, otherwise there is a risk of not delivering what intended. Examples of tools and methods that support project managers in performing this processes are described further in the article.

Background

Before approaching a process of assigning roles and responsibilities to the Project Team, it is essential to correctly define a project size. Taking under consideration the pharmaceutical company best practices, a project size is defined mostly based on the Total Project Cost (TPC) and distributes as followed:

• Low-complexity projects (below 10 million DKK)
• Medium-complexity projects (more than 10 but less than 100 million DKK)
• Large-complexity projects (above 100 million DKK)

The article focuses on the Medium-complexity projects to cover the steps that do not necessarily appear in the Low-complexity projects but are relevant for project managers to be similar with.

Introduction to Project Human Resource Management

Figure 1: Project Human Resource Management Overview, inspired by the PMBOK® Guide

Project Human Resource Management is one of the Project Management Knowledge Areas and includes a set of processes, performed within a project, which ensures the most effective use of human resources. There are three major processes within Project Human Resource Management, namely :

• Organizational Planning - identifying, assessing and documenting roles and responsibilities as well as reporting relationships present in a project
• Staff Acquisition - assigning the needed human resources to working on a project
• Team Development - developing of Project Team skills for team as a whole as well as for individual team members to increase level of project performance

The article focuses on Organizational Planning process, mostly on the usage of tools and techniques it contains, to generate successful output in terms of adequate assignment roles and responsibilities to the Project Team as well as transparent Organizational Chart.

Organizational Planning

Appropriate allocation of roles and responsibilities among the Project Team members and its transparency are crucial for successful project performance. That is why Organizational Planning process is done during the earliest phases of the Project Life Cycle. Nevertheless, project managers shall remember to review it regularly throughout the project, so it is ensured that just necessary roles and responsibilities are performed.

The main purpose for this process is to:

• Ensure a visible structure for overall roles and responisbilities
• Ensure clear roles and responsibilities
• Ensure fast reporting and decision making processes
• Secure sufficient resources for the project and the right competencies

It is important that the project Organizational Planning setup is documented, fully understood and agreed upon by all Project Team members to ensure clear roles and responsibilities.

Tools & Techniques Application

Once a project manager defined the project size and identified key roles and responsibilities, it is a time to form the Project Team out of the people who possess necessary competencies and experience. Project Manager shall preferably choose an internally available human resources from a parent company. Alternatively there is a possibility of hiring someone external, for instance from a consulting company, in case there is a need for a specialist who is not available in the parent company at that time.

In order to obtain desirable outcomes from the project Organizational Planning and hence perform this process successfully, a project manager shall respectively:

1. Assign roles to the Project Team members - make sure to assign proper roles to proper people and ensure the Organizational Chart is created as an output
2. Allocate responsibilities among the Project Team members - make sure to have Responsibility Assignment Matrix as an output
3. Make sure the staffing management plan is regularly checked throughout the Project Life Cycle

Project Team Roles and Responsibilities

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

by using Belbin ? MENTION MEDIUM COMPLEXITY PROJECT AND THAT THEY CAN HAVE ROLES INDIVIDUALLY AND IN THE GROUPS,

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

Belbin Team Roles

Worth considering for project manager

Responsibility Assignment Matrix

RESPONSIBILITY MATRIX FIGURE TO BE ADDED

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.

Organizational Chart

ORGANIZATIONAL CHART FIGURE TO BE ADDED

Organizational Breakdown Structure (OSB)

How to ensure responsibilities compliance

- Feedback template

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

• Roles and Responsibilities need to be strongly link to the Project Scope
• Roles and Responsibilities change over the Project Life Cycle - how to keep on track so resources are not wasted if there is no need for them anymore (how should they be released - reduces cost and eliminates uncertainty)

Summary

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

Annotated 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.

• Project Management Institute. "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® guide)". 1996 Edition.

This book includes a relevant theory, concepts, and terminology within Project Management.