Team Roles and Responsibilities

Team Roles and Responsibilities Template is an activity to document roles and responsibilities of those involved in a project.

Use this process to assign roles and responsibilities to members of your change / project team and to ensure that the team as a whole can proceed on a firm footing.

You can then proceed secure in knowing who is doing which aspects of the work. This is a great team building exercise.

Objectives

• To help your team understand who has responsibility for which aspects of the project and where hand-offs occur.
• To ensure roles and responsibilities are not duplicated; avoids gaps (work ‘falling through the cracks’!) and promotes team efficiency.

When Would You Use It?

• In the early stages of your project before you set about delivering your project plan.
• This activity can also be used to bring multiple teams together behind a shared goal or objective.

Resources Required

• 1 hour.
• A large quiet room with wall space that you can put the completed templates up on.
• Multiple print-outs of the Roles & Responsibilities template (1 for each team member).
• Marker pens for everyone.

Process

1. The first step is to identify all the key roles needed to fulfill the project and generate a template for each role.

2. A single role may be just one part of a person’s job, among others; and a single person may do more than one role on the same change project.
3. It is helpful to separate the prime responsibility of a role from the other, less critical aspects of the role. This helps to set expectations appropriately.
4. In the Interface column it is helpful to identify the individuals or groups with which the role-holder must make contact so as to discharge their responsibilities. Usually this includes stakeholders both up and down the chain of delegated responsibility, as well as colleagues working at the same level in the team but with other, interdependent responsibilities.
5. Each completed template should be agreed among all the team members so that everyone understands their respective and collective responsibilities.
6. The finished template then becomes a Terms of Reference for the role-holder.

TIP: You can download this template for free at the bottom of this page

Secret Sauce

• Get the role incumbent to complete the template for their role.
• Ensure all team members review and agree the complete set.
• If a team member is not there then don’t be tempted to complete their template for them. If you want each person’s buy-in to their role then it’s important they complete the template themselves.