What it is: Identify High-Level Roles

Description
When initiating a project you need to identify staff resources needed to complete the project. The two aspects to this task are:

1. Identify staff roles: A preliminary or high-level description of roles, responsibilities, skills, time commitments and sources of key project staff. This can be in the form of a list of titles and positions (i.e., customer contact, lead programmer, systems analyst, operations and support specialist etc.).
2. Identify planning team members: The names and titles of team members assigned to perform the planning activities in the Plan Stage.

Rationale/Purpose
Identifying key staff roles is essential to determine initial project labor cost estimates. This information is refined in the Plan Stage when actual team members are assigned and the detailed project schedule is constructed.

Who is involved
Project Manager
Project Sponsor
Project Stakeholders

Result
This information is included in a separate section of your project charter often referred to as:

• Roles and responsibilities
• Project staff

 

How to: Identify High-Level Roles

Recommended actions and strategies
The table below describes several actions that you can perform to identify high level staff requirements for a project.      

	What to do	How to do it
1	Create a list of the required project roles	List all the roles that will be involved at some capacity in the project. Some may be indirectly involved as supporting organizational unit, a steering committee, or as an external vendor or supplier. Some roles have on-going work assignments such as the members of the project team.
2	Define the responsibilities	For each role, briefly describe its responsibility.
3	Define skills required	For each role as needed, list the skills the staff resource filling the role must possess. Example: Technical writing, Java programming
4	Determine the full time equivalent (FTE) level of effort for each role	Break this into a given time frame – usually the fiscal quarter or fiscal year at this level of planning.  A person working full-time would be equivalent to 1.0 and half-time would be .50 etc.
5	Determine the potential source for each role	Indicate the business organization from which the resource might be recruited or indicate if the resource will be sourced from outside as a contactor.
6	Create a project organization chart	The chart should show the reporting relationships of the roles. Note: When actual team members are recruited and assigned in the planning stage, the project organization chart can be updated with the team member’s name.
7	Identify planning stage team members	List the names and responsibilities of the project team members who will be responsible for the planning stage activities.

 

Templates/Examples: Identify High-Level Roles

Introduction
The table below provides several tools and templates you can use to help identify high level staffing requirements for your project.

Template	Example
Identify High-Level Roles	Identify High-Level Roles