• 21 Ways to Excel at Project Management

Defining Roles & Responsibilities

Question 9: Have you clearly defined the project roles and responsibilities?

Good Practice: The project manager must ensure that the project's roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. You should keep the organisational structure as simple as possible.

The following structure works well on large projects:

Executive Sponsor

• Highest ranking manager on the project.
• Vocal champion for the project at an executive level.
• Secures budget for the project.
• The final decision-maker for the project.

Business Sponsor

• Champion of the project, who receives regular updates.
• Approves the project’s goals and objectives.
• Attends regular project review meetings.
• An important decision-maker for the project.
• Usually chairs the steering committee.

Steering Committee (also known as the Project Board)

• Composed of senior managers from the business.
• Responsible for oversight, control and critical project decisions.
• Meets every 4 to 6 weeks.
• Helps resolve issues, approve scope changes and offers guidance and direction.

Project Team

• Responsible for planning and executing the project.
• Led by the project manager, who reports to the steering committee.
• Must include a user representative.
• Must include some vendor representatives.
• Must include some technical expertise.

User Group

• Led by the user representative.
• Must include subject matter experts (SMEs) from the business.
• Responsible for user acceptance testing of the product or service.

Vendors

• Contracted to supply products and services to the project.

The roles and responsibilities for managing the project must be fully documented and adapted to suit the project's size and complexity and the organisation's skills.

One of the many roles of the project manager is to actively drive the steering committee, ensuring regular meetings take place, providing clear agendas, and ensuring that crucial decisions get made, and actions get followed up.

Common Mistakes

• No clear ownership of the project.
• Lack of leadership and commitment from the steering committee.
• Roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined.
• Disconnection between the project team and steering committee, such as discussions not being open and honest.

Note: This comment is from a project team member. I was never quite sure what I was supposed to be doing.

Warning Sign: The business sponsor fails to attend scheduled project review meetings.