Defining Roles, Responsibilities, and Skills in Project Staffing Plan
The goal of a project staffing strategy is to ensure that the project has enough human resources with the skills, expertise, and experience necessary to complete the work successfully. Roles, responsibilities, and abilities are the plan’s most important components, and they should be carefully evaluated.
The following blog contains common project job, responsibility, and skill definitions, as well as a brief description of how to plan project staffing needs using these definitions.
Defining project roles
In project staffing and management, using role-based models is a flexible way to associate participants with specific job assignments and responsibilities, ensuring that each individual/group acts within the scope and content of the assigned function.
Throughout the course of work, this strategy allows for clarity, efficiency, and predictability in collaborative exchanges amongst staff members. Customer, Sponsor, Team Member, Project Manager, Steering Committee, Team Leader, Facilitator, and Vendor are examples of positions.
Temporary and permanent roles
A job description is, by definition, similar to a project role. A team member can be allocated to one or more occupations at the same time, and this person can fill many responsibilities, both temporary (depending on the situation) and permanent (lasting throughout the entire project lifecycle).
For example, during the planning stage, one person can serve as team leader from the beginning to the completion of the project while simultaneously being required to undertake some temporary duties (e.g., subject matter expert and business analyst). When this stage is completed, the employee will quit the temporary jobs and concentrate on the core team leadership responsibilities.
It’s worth noting that in certain cases, temporary roles aren’t specified in the project staffing plan (instead, they’re explained in supporting paperwork), but only key and permanent roles are. The specificity and personnel requirements set by the business entity that runs and manages the project will determine this.
Defining staff responsibilities
When a team member is assigned to a project role, he or she is given specific responsibilities as well as the authority to take action or make choices that are not prohibited by the allocated position. Project staff duties, in general, define roles and authorities.
Responsibilities differ depending on the project. Meanwhile, most projects share some common groupings of duties that characterize the processes and stages of the project management process, as follows:
- Conceptualizing: the basic responsibilities and assignments for justifying, developing, and approving project concepts, defining the scope of work (including a budget, time, and quality restrictions), and commencing work.
- Planning: a set of roles and duties for creating effective plans (including a template for a staffing plan) and choosing the best course of action for the project.
- Implementing: the responsibilities for carrying out the overall project plan and all tasks and activities related to the execution process
- Controlling: a variety of roles focused on progress oversight, goal tracking, team coordination, status reporting, deliverables quality assurance, change control, and other similar tasks
- Terminating: when the project objectives are met and the deliverables are handed over to the customer, close down each incomplete activity and related artifacts.
RRM – Roles and Responsibilities Matrix
It is excellent practice to integrate all positions and related duties into a single document that can be shared with all individuals involved after they have been identified and defined. A roles and responsibilities matrix (RRM) can be used to specify which activity categories the participants will be assigned to, how they can interact with one another within the boundaries of their roles and authorities, and what duties they should do throughout the project lifecycle. It’s worth noting that RRM doesn’t specify actual employee allocations; rather, it’s merely a legend of project staffing requirements.
Evaluating employee skills
Employee skills are assessed against specific standards to determine whether project team members are capable of performing their jobs and responsibilities successfully and efficiently. Because it allows for the consideration of knowledge/skill elements in selecting the correct employees with the competence required for success achievement, skills evaluation is an important part of the staffing plan process.
Factor analysis to address project staffing needs
Factor analysis is a method for evaluating employee capabilities and selecting employees with the appropriate knowledge and abilities for a project. Following such an analysis, a compliance profile for each candidate for a project role must be established, in which the prospect’s abilities and expertise are ranked against a set of requirements (or factors) that best exemplify the staffing needs.
The evaluator can then create a spider chart that visualizes the skills level versus the baseline factor grade using the ranks in the candidate’s profile. Following the evaluation of all candidates, the evaluator must compare their spider charts and select those who have demonstrated grades that are closest to the baseline.
Note that this project reflects a certain baseline factor level that differs from other projects because each project is unique and based around individual staffing plan requirements. Experts should establish and specify the baseline factor level at the start of the skills evaluation procedure.
