Roles & Responsibilities
Prep time: 15 minutes
Run time: 60 minutes
No. people needed: 3-5 people
Use the Roles & Responsibilities Play to clarify individual responsibilities, identify role or skills gaps, and build a stronger team. A lot of teams think they have a clear understanding of who is doing what in their team. But if you asked different people on the team the same questions, the answers are often different. A lot of teams aren't aware that their roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined. Or even worse: They have a totally different understanding of the responsibility of a specific role.
So here are some questions for you:
- Are the responsibilities clear for each person on your team?
- Are roles clearly defined and has everyone in the team got the same understanding of it?
- Does your team have gaps in the roles, responsibilities or capabilities required to get the results needed?
- Does your team get stuck in disagreements or trying to reach consensus on everything?
- Has your team duplicated work?
Any of that sound familiar? The Roles and Responsibilities Play from the Atlassian Team Playbook can guide:
- generating a shared understanding on the different roles in your team and their unique responsibilities.
- proactively working through tensions to get on the same page up front, rather than sorting it out during work in progress and slowing down delivery.
Steps:
Run through each of the below steps in our Roles & Responsibilities Play on the Atlassian Team Playbook. You should repeat this play every 3-6 month. New roles might be added to your team and responsibilities might have changed.
- Prepare the Roles and Responsibilities template and share the Roles & Responsibilities Play with your team to share context. Your team’s objective should be at the top of the page, and set the focus for the responsibilities listed that contribute to this objective 5 MIN CONFLUENCE
- Identify roles 5 MIN CONFLUENCE
- Identify your teammates responsibilities by adding notes on just what you think others do. You can do this live or leave it open for a few days for asynchronous collaboration. 15 MIN CONFLUENCE
- Identify your responsibilities. Add notes just to what you think you do. Use the comments column or feature in confluence to call out misunderstandings, gaps, or context to discuss with the team live when you regroup. 15 MIN CONFLUENCE
- Discuss role responsibilities. 15 MIN LIVE MEETING
- Review unowned responsibilities. 15 MIN LIVE MEETING
- Summarize and identify next steps. 5 MIN LIVE MEETING
If you have feedback or want to share success stories, we want to hear from you! Join us in the Teamwork Lab community!
And be sure to check out the Atlassian University course How to shape effective teams. You'll get facilitation guides, detailed overviews of how to run each play, and solutions to common challenges.
Team Poster
Previous step:
Next step:
Working AgreementsWas this content helpful?
Connect, share, or get additional help
Atlassian Community