Digital Project Team Roles
A Project Team may need to be formed when a particular service delivery need is identified.
Project teams will include a team lead and will combine designers, developers, researchers, content specialists and project managers to deliver a project. The size and composition of teams will be governed by the scope and nature of the project.
A digital project delivery team needs to be able to:
- analyze user needs, and turn these into user stories
- manage the scope and prioritization of stories
- manage and report to stakeholders
- manage dependencies on other teams
- where needed, procure services or solutions from 3rd parties
- design, build, test, demo and iterate software solutions (the ‘making’!)
- test solutions on real users
- deploy and host the software
- find solutions for accrediting and handling of data
- support the live running of the service (monitoring, fixing things when they break, responding to users)
There is no hard and fast rule on the roles or team structure needed to fulfil these functions, but a core team may consist of some of or a combination of people to address these roles:
- Team Leader (‘product owner’)
- There must be a single product owner who has the authority and responsibility to assign tasks and work elements; make business, product, and technical decisions; and be accountable for the success or failure of the overall service. This product owner is ultimately responsible for how well the service meets needs of its users, which is how a service should be evaluated. The product owner is responsible for ensuring that features are built and managing the feature and bug backlogs.
- Project manager
- Strong estimation and budget scoping skills, experience delivering digital services, good organizational and communication skills
- Technical architecture
- Designing technical solutions to address complex needs and problems
- Designers
- Graphic as well as interactive design skills
- User researchers
- Designing, facilitating and analyzing user research
- Developers
- Building software responses to identified needs
- Content designers
- Insuring that the writing on the site or service meets the needs of the user as clearly, simply and quickly as possible
- Support of some web ops expertise
- System administrators who run the production systems and help the development team build software that is easy to operate, scale and secure
The team will also have a shared understanding of the accessibility needs and possible assisted digital needs of a service’s users.