A project will only be as successful as the team behind it. With a good team, you increase your chances of delivering projects that exceed expectations. Typically, every team is made up of several people playing different roles. It’s important that you clearly define these roles when assembling your team to maximize its effectiveness.
Need help understanding various project team roles and responsibilities? We break it all down for you, plus share tips on how to build a successful project team.
What Is a Project Team?
A project team is a group of individuals formed to work together on a specific project or initiative. The team has shared goals and objectives, and members collaborate to achieve them.
Each team member performs their tasks and contributes to the project’s success. Team roles and responsibilities can be assigned to full-time or part-time employees, contractors, subject matter experts, or other external stakeholders.
You’ll often find a mixture of experts with varying skills, abilities, and experiences in a team. Many project teams are cross-functional or comprise people from different groups within the organization.
Establishing a project team ensures that all your projects have a dedicated group with varying skills and experiences to complete the project as efficiently as possible.
What Are the Key Project Roles and Their Responsibilities?
Each project has unique requirements and so team structure can vary. But here are some of the major roles you can expect to see in a project team.
1. Project sponsor
A project sponsor is deeply invested in the project and its success. They’re typically senior executives with a stake in the project’s outcome. A project sponsor works closely with the project manager and participates in high-level project planning.
Project sponsors are also involved in resolving bottlenecks that may occur throughout the project life cycle. They often sign off on approvals needed to move the project to the next phase.
Project sponsor responsibilities
The project sponsor’s responsibilities may include:
- Making critical business decisions and creating the project vision
- Approving the project budget and schedule adjustments
- Ensuring the availability of project resources
- Communicating the project’s goals throughout the organization
- Helping the project manager source the education and other resources team members may need for their work
- Resolving conflicts among the team members if the project manager cannot
2. Project manager
A project manager is responsible for the day-to-day operations and ensuring the team completes the project on time, within budget, and achieves its objectives. The project manager’s role is to plan, schedule, build a project team, and manage their workload throughout the project’s life cycle. They also manage project risks and the budget.
In a small-scale project, the project manager oversees each team member. For a large-scale project, the project manager oversees team leaders, who each manage their group.
Project manager responsibilities
Project manager responsibilities include:
- Creating the project plan and schedule
- Creating various deadlines based on project needs and stakeholder requests
- Recruiting project staff
- Managing deliverables according to the plan
- Managing the project budget and schedule
- Leading and managing the project team
- Determining the project methodology, they’ll use to manage the project
- Assigning tasks to project team members
- Communicating with upper management and other stakeholders
3. Project analyst
A project analyst supports the project manager by providing them with analyzed data to aid project management decision-making. They help the manager identify the project’s requirements and determine the best approach to its objectives.
Project analysts collaborate with all relevant stakeholders to ensure the project’s deliverables meet the organization’s needs.
Project analyst responsibilities
On a project team, the project analyst’s responsibilities include:
- Helping the project team define the project and establish project goals.
- Gathering requirements from business units or users
- Documenting and analyzing technical and business requirements
- Verifying that project deliverables meet the requirements and support the overarching objective of the project and business
- Testing solutions to validate objectives
- Solving problems with project resources
- Use available tools to help team members.
4. Resource manager
A resource manager works with the project manager to ensure the team has all the resources needed. The resource manager is not directly associated with any specific projects. Instead, they move to the next once they allocate resources to one project.
Resource manager responsibilities
Resource manager’s day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Identify the right people for a project through efficient resource planning and allocation.
- Capacity planning to ensure all projects in the pipeline have the resources they need.
- Estimating resource requirements.
- Reallocating resources, adjusting requirements, and marking critical resource requirements as advised by the project manager.
- Scanning and filtering resources by experience, skills, and availability.
- Staying on top of resource availability and utilization.
- Monitoring and optimizing the use of resources throughout the course of the project to make sure it can be completed successfully.
- Coordinating employee performance reviews, training, resource development, etc.
- Connecting with external vendors to fill up resources temporarily whenever necessary
- Staying up to date with the latest labor laws, documenting processes, maintaining records, etc.
5. Project team members
Project team members are the people who actively execute he tasks assigned to them by the project manager. The individuals may be in-house staff or external consultants working on the project full-time or part-time.
The team members have skills relevant to the project and are responsible for executing their tasks and updating their statuses to the project manager. The manager then uses these updates to track the overall project progress.
Project team member responsibilities
Project team member responsibilities can vary according to each project but typically involve:
- Contributing to overall project goals and objectives.
- Completing individual deliverables within the expected time frame.
- Providing expertise.
- Working with users to establish and meet business needs.
- Documenting the process.
- Working with users to establish business needs
- Collaborating with other team members.
- Communicating with the project manager about roadblocks.
How Do You Build an Effective Project Management Team?
The key to a successful project depends on the team executing it. A strong team has a higher chance of delivering a successful project. However, you need to build a strong team it just won’t magically happen. Here’s what you need to do to build an effective project management team.
Clearly define your goals
When building your team, make sure that you have well-defined and measurable goals. This ensures that individuals know what they’re working for. They get to understand the value that the project will bring and see what their contribution is to the final result.
Get the right people to do the job
A team will be useless if the people don’t have what it takes to complete project tasks. So evaluate candidates’ professional performance and human qualities. Then assign tasks to those who qualify.
Keep communication open
Communication is the glue that holds a team together. Provide open communication channels that make people comfortable expressing themselves. Proper communication keeps the team interconnected and aware of progress and changes in the project management process. Team members are also able to respond to these changes accordingly.
Be the lead
As the project manager, it’s your responsibility to lead and manage your team just as you’re managing the project. Be there to resolve conflicts between individuals and guide the team with respect, open communication, and transparency.
Provide a positive working environment
Keep your team members motivated and genuinely support their well-being. This will keep your team engaged and create a harmonious, collaborative working environment.
5 Characteristics of a Successful Project Team
While having the right skills is crucial to a successful team, some specific characteristics and factors make a team even better.
Here are five qualities you should consider when building the best project team possible.
1. Diversity
Teams of diverse gender, culture, age, perspectives, and experiences are more likely to drive performance, profitability, innovation, and more. The more diverse your team, the broader set of knowledge, skills, and approaches you’ll have to draw upon when running your project.
2. Strong communication
People who can communicate well are essential within project teams. When people can express themselves, you can better coordinate your project, avoid misunderstandings and build harmonious relationships.
3. Competence
Your team members should have the knowledge and skill to perform technical tasks. They should also have the willingness or motivation to perform and the ability to collaborate with others.
4. Team player
Individuals who can see beyond their wants and focus on the project’s needs make the best team members. Such people make it easy for the team to focus on project priorities.
5. Accountable
Each individual is responsible for completing their assigned tasks on time and should be open to accountability. They understand that they are responsible for moving tasks along, sticking to deadlines, and providing regular status updates.
Manage Your Team Roles and Responsibilities with Mission Control
Team success doesn’t just happen. It takes analysis, planning, and reliable technology. Mission Control is one of the most robust team management software. It connects the entire team, improves collaboration, and reduces confusion.
Our solution offers various tools for efficient resource planning and allocation, task management, progress monitoring, and reporting. The Gantt chart, for instance, is quite handy when planning and scheduling a project. You can use it to create a project timeline, add resources and assign tasks and milestones.
Want to learn more about how Mission Control can help you build effective teams? Request a demo today.
