Roles and responsibilities

Considerations

These are the things that need to be considered and kept on top of thoughout the life of the project - not just during active development, but also as long as we want any tools to be available after active development.

We might not have experts own each of these, but we should know what should be thought about.

Compliance

• Approve procurement, payments

• Legal requirements?

• Contractual requirements?

Project administration

• Project budget is up to date.

• Project actual transactions are within budget

• Project is fully utilising resources or freeing them for others to use - it's not under-spending.

• Meeting minutes (incl action items) are taken, circulated

Backlog maintenance

• Tracking requests, requirements

• Keeping things up to date

• Clearly defined

User research

• Who are intended users? Is that realistic?

• What do users actually need?

• What would they actually use?

Domain research

• Do we know what we're talking about?

• Do we have a partner or can we contract someone who does?

• Ensure correctness

Create content

• Guides

• Social media content

Communicating using the chosen medium

• Who ensures we get the best out of the medium?

• Communicating using a textbook and twitter are vastly different

• Typically responsive web, social media, videos

• Sometimes apps, flyers, booklets, radio

Communicate for the user

• Do the users understand technical terminology?

• Will users need to use technical terminology to complete their task?

• Do we primarily use technical terms and provide guidance, or introduce concepts using more colloquial wording and bring terminology in more slowly?

Visual design

• Consistency for user experience

• Impacts our brand

• User and decision-maker confidence in the tool

Technical leadership

• Specify tasks for contracted developers

• Review change proposals from contracted developers

• Overall technical design

• OpenUp technical best practices are followed or deviated from with good reason

• Deploy changes

Software implementation

• Frontend

• Backend

Community management

• Ensure we respond to feedback, information requests

• Maintain discussion groups where relevant

Uptime - keeping it available

• Detect that it's unavailable - e.g. the server dies and the website is unavailable

• Respond when it's unavailable

Evaluation

• Figure out whether what we did actually changed anything, and if it's for the better

• Help define and answer questions we have - e.g.

  • Do people manage to complete their task when using our offering?

  • Do our methods make things easier or have no impact on the ease of the task?

Bringing it all together

• Ensure all these concerns are considered in the project context

• Make overarching decisions

• Prioritise work, what happens when, given available money, people, opportunities

• All information is consistent, the project evolves in a way that different pieces don't become disjointed

Required roles

These roles must be clearly assigned on each project. More than one role may be assigned to one person.

It is not recommended that the Product Owner takes on Implementing Team responsibilities.

By becoming part of the implementing team, the Product Owner violates the separation between purely representing user needs, and the self-organising implementing team deciding on the most appropriate way to satisfy those needs.

The healthiest teams usually maintain this separation, but advocate for their concerns through clear and open discussion for mutual understanding.

​Implementing team

In Scrum for a software team, this would be the Development Team.

All roles other than the Product Owner and Project Manager form part of the Implementing team.

Product Owner

Responsible for maximising the value of the work of the team.

See the full definition in the Scrum Guide. Where the Scrum Guide uses "Product", we might use "Project" or "Intervention".

The Product Owner is one person, not a committee. When a committee or someone within a client or partner organisation makes prioritisation decisions but does not own all the responsibilities of maximising value, like driving user research, we assign a Proxy Product Owner.

The product owner keeps their eye on the larger vision and advocates for user needs, ensuring they care considered in implementation decisions.

Project Manager

The project manager is the task-driver on any project. They are responsible for determining work breakdown, negotiating resources, facilitating team communication, raising risks, issues and concerns and generally keeping the project on track. The project manager acts as the liaison between all team members, including external stakeholders.

Lead Developer

(Necessary when any technology is involved in a project)

• Technical design - the code is maintainable

• Technical requirements and opportunities - help the rest of the project team understand what technical solutions can offer, and their rough cost - help make trade-offs

• Uptime - notice when the site is down and coordinate response

• Technical specification - ensure technical requirements are clear for implementors

• Code integration and quality - review proposed implementations and merge and deploy when ready

Additional roles

Designer

• Consistent and accessible visual design

• Relevant and context-appropriate illustrations

Communications & Marketing Lead

It is important to involve the communications person as early in the project as possible.

Developer (contracted)

Intermediate to senior level works best for us, since junior developers need a long lead time to get productive