Project Roles, Responsibilities and Documentation

What roles exist in a Project?

We can analyse the roles of a project team member in two different ways. Once the technical role such as project manager, work chain manager and others and the behavioural role according to Belbin such as the maker or the teamer, which roles there are in each of the two categories, we have already described in detail in the article “Roles in a project”. Once again summarized for the overview:

The technical roles describe the assigned function of a project team member in a project and determines their responsibilities and tasks. By default, there are the following roles:

• The Projekt Manager
• The Work Package Manager
• The Project Worker
• The Projektmanagement Office (PMO)

There can be other roles in a project as needed, what these are and what tasks fall under each must be decided on a project-specific basis and defined in the project manual.

The roles according to Belbin are divided into 3 categories, where each category includes 4 roles, these are:

• Action-oriented roles
  • maker, implementer, perfectionist
• Communication-oriented roles
  • Coordinator, team worker, pioneer
• Knowledge-oriented roles
  • Inventor, observer, specialist

What do I have to pay attention to, when defining the roles?

The roles according to Belbin cannot be determined from the outside, they are behaviors and traits that a project member automatically assumes in a team-related environment.

However, these role affiliations or tendencies can be helpful for the project manager or the client to assign the professional roles. In addition to these criteria, the technical knowledge and work experience of the individual also play a major role. Knowing the working methods of your team members simplifies the cooperation and team structuring.

How do I determine responsible persons?

In a project it is necessary to determine several types of responsible persons.

At the beginning it is necessary to determine project responsibility. This is the responsibility of the project management and is usually determined by the client.

Likewise, work package managers must be determined. This task lies with the project management. It should be noted that each work package can have only one person responsible, but one employee can be responsible for several packages. In this case, the workload of the individual employees must also be considered in order to achieve the best possible productivity.

The third category of accountability is the assignment of responsibility for the stakeholders in a project. Each stakeholder must be assigned a responsible person, who is defined and documented during the stakeholder analysis.

What has to be considered for documentation?

Many different documents are created during work on a project. These must be categorized and systematically filed.

To ensure that this remains clear, we need documentation management. This determines:

• which templates we work with (the content structure of a document) the structures of the templates used are defined and named in the project manual,
• in which way documents are named (title and number)
• where they will be stored (cloud, internal folder, …)
• and in which form documents are stored (Word, pdf, jpg, …)

It is also necessary to define which employee has access to which documents, either to view them or to edit them.

The chosen documentation form, type and responsibility is detailed in a so-called documentation matrix.

What does a document matrix look like?

The document matrix is a table that clearly shows the contents of the documentation management.

The first column names the document, the others define its execution and storage. The complete matrix should look like this at the end:

Dokument	Template	Name	Location	Format	Insight
BSP:
Status reports	Template Form 2	Statusreport.creator.date	Folder ProjektM, Subfolder Statusberichte	word	Project team, Client

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