Roles and Responsibilities in Agile Project Management

If you find yourself in a Team that practices Agile project management, I think that it’s important that you know what your role is what responsibilities you have. With ‘self-management’ being a key term in this methodology of developing software projects, a lot of people might get lost in the job, take too much on or not actually do the right work.

Agile project management is sometimes hard to understand, implement and even evaluate. I think that knowing what you’re supposed to do on both the individual and team level is important to achieving a true Agile project.

Scroll down to your role on the team or if you’re the Scrum Master, make sure that everyone knows what’s being expected of them:

QA/Testers

• Deliver quality product. You have to verify each little bit of the project before the users validate it. Experienced testers and QA workers need to describe acceptance criteria before any of the software is coded or written. You have to identify the common problems, mistakes and issues so that as the product is written, these issues are already resolved.
• Provide early feedback. You have to good feedback as often as you can , on anything and as easrly as possible. Although this may seem to interrupt the process, it cuts cost drastically.
• Add value to the business. You essentially contribute to helping solve the business problem by starting early and constantly testing until everything is done.

Team Leader

• Clear goals. Whenever issues arise, your first action should be to look at the team’s goals and the expectations set at the beginning of the project.
• Open communications. You have to maintain optimum team functioning through keeping lines of communication open between everyone on the team. You must make sure that everyone is fully informed so they can self-manage.
• Form positive relationships. Interpersonal issues are always going to crop up during the project lifecycles. Your job is to address them immediately and maintain positive relationships among all the team members.
• Create consensus and commitment. Everyone has to be on the same page. This means that you have to get everyone involved in the decision-making process.
• Instill a sense of responsibility and ownership. It’s your job to make sure that everyone knows which part they play in the project. This not only lets people know what’s expected of them, but the chance to excel and gain recognition from a job well done. You have to make sure that no one is struggling with too many responsibilities.
• Report on progress and give feedback. This is where you have to update everyone on how the project is doing. Since you operate through gaining small increments on the project every week, you have to give everyone a chance to report and share their achievements for the week. You should also facilitate constructive criticism and feedback during your Scrums.

Aside from these roles, Scrum Masters and team managers are expected to be innovative, strategic, passionate, tactical, approachable, able to delegate and collaborative. You essentially have to be the heart of the whole project, making every part work together with the others in a slowly evolving organism.

Incremental changes, empirical analysis and self-management are the main features of any Agile project management implementation. This requires hard data, good feedback, motivated teams and collaboration to happen.