Agile Team Roles
First off, need to make sure that all those involved in the Agile project execution understand their roles and responsibilities.
| Role | Key Responsibilities |
| Agile Lead | Responsible for agile practices are properly implemented in project/product team.Ensures close cooperation across all roles and teams working distributed.Responsible for removal of team-based impediments; this becomes critical in distributed team. Escalates to get support from leadership team to resolve impediments.Ensures that collaborative tools, such as IM/skype, task boards & white board are available all members working as distributed team.Ensures a continuous improvement process and tailoring for fitment to be in place.Ensures Agile Management tool such as VSTS is used to track agile way of working.Ensures facilitate various meetings (Standups, Iteration planning, demos and retrospectives)Motivates and supports the team.Along with team, responsible to agree key metrics/KPIs to be followed for the project; capture data points and report to IT-Manager (AA) and Delivery Manager (provider)Responsible to compile the iteration report and share it’s all key stakeholders. #) Team lead may not always be a full-time role, based on capacity and capability he/she can take-up team member role to participate in development; Or can act as Architect role; etc. #) In Scrum world, this role is mapped to scrum master role. |
| Product Owner | Product Owner is one individual on the team who speaks as the ‘one voice of customer’. Primary business representative responsible for product definition: Owns product backlog in Agile tool ( VSTS ); ensures all requirements are clearly recorded as user stories and prioritizes all work for the team. Decision making power: Responsible to request the Project and Maintenance budget for the product.Represent the product for the Business sponsor in a Project, for the Business Partnership divisions and the Operational teams though governance bodies. Establish, nurture and communicate the product vision: Organizes iterative reviews/demos with the team. When working with distributed team, PO ensures to utilize collaboration tools such as Skpye-video calls and screen sharing’s,etc. Able to create product backlog items from product vision; by working with business analyst.PO work closely with collocated and distributed teams to answer any questions related to requirements. Evaluate business value and set priorities: Continually re-priorities and adjust scope based on the evolving needs.Educates the team and stakeholders about importance of business value.Apart from prioritization, PO adds business value to all product backlog items.Measure and reports the Business value delivered at each iteration by the team. Work closely with the team: Works closely with IT-Manager/Owner to accommodate the changes in requirement or their priorities during iterations.Ensures active participant in acceptance test. |
| Team Member | The Team member is commonly part of 5 to 9 persons team, they are self-organized, cross-functional and responsible for producing the actual solution. Team member will hold one or two or more responsibilities such as analyzer, designer, developer, tester, etc. based on their functional and technical skills / specialties. This Team can be co-located or distributed, in case of distributed more focus required to Distributed Agile teams rely on accountability at an individual level and trust at an organizational level. While remote can’t reside in the same physical space, it is very possible to create an online community with the goal of knowledge sharing.Key team members are prepared to travel between locations, these members generally referred as team ambassadors because they share information between the distributed teams and often help to settle differences between distributed team members.Ensure to adopt eXtreme Programming practices such as TDD, peer reviews, pair programming’s, Continues integration.Continuous integration is even more helpful when team members are distributed geographically and may have different working hours due to time zones. Its a best practice for keeping the source code in a continuously “working state” improves both efficiency and productivity.Organized to estimate (if necessary), analyze, design, develop the stories, test, integrate, deploy and maintain the product through its whole lifecycle.Ensures to improve the productivity, the distributed teams requires widespread use of good, reliable collaboration tools such as Skype. Instant messaging has nearly replaced in-person collaboration (even when people are in the same office!).Responsible to report any impediment to Agile lead for timely resolution.Estimate the effort associated with developmentsSchedule its activities during the sprint, including tests and solution integrationMeet the priorities set by the Product OwnerAgree on the content of each iteration.Provides all required inputs /data points to Agile Lead, so that Iteration report is generated.Team involves actively in all agile ceremonies; distributed teams make use of collaborations and Agile management tool during these ceremonies. |
| IT-Owner | Is the Primary IT representative owning the long term vision of the architecture of a solutionOwns team engagement / provider for implementation of the Solution and associated costs (from project contribution, to maintenance & continuous improvement)Responsible to deploy infrastructure required for co-located or distributed teams. Responsible to review the project metrics / KPI’s.Represent the solution in front of the business (sponsor, partnership and operational teams).Collaborate with the Product Owner and the realization team to have the requested solution delivered.Reviews the distributed team effectiveness, profiles definition and continuous improvement of the team.Responsible for the operational quality of a product.Own the implementation costs of the requested features in estimates and actual implementation.Reviews and coordinate with team and agile lead on progress of development and support work.Ensures team is align the solution against the Target Architecture, Group standards and security guidelines.Responsible for the delivery of the solution in Production as per Release schedule.Supports and motivates team and agile lead to adopt best practices of distributed agile and eXtreme Programming. |
| Agile Coach | Serves in a mentoring or coaching role only and he/she not part of the agile team.Often a person from outside the organization, able to provide objective guidance, without personal or political considerations.Ensures to share the best practices for team adoption. Helps both business and delivery team members for using Agile & distributed practices and tools.Provide training to the team on the agile process; training will continue all the time during the project execution on agile and continuous improvement on velocity, quality, processes etc.Ensures to provide help team and especially agile lead to answer all the questions on the agile process. “Coaching is about resetting people’s intuition” |
| Stakeholder | Other missions are contributing to the Agile practice, Program Managers, Executives, Architect, Project Manager, Infra Engineer, etc. Contributors (Architecture, Change Management, UX-design, Test, Infra …) are also playing a key role in the product development success. Architect / Business Analyst role become key when working in complex products / programs; he/she will be involved closely with Agile team either as full-time or part-time based on business need. While working in DevOps environment, make sure that there’s as much overlap as possible between developers and infrastructure engineers – these are the roles that need to collaborate most closely, so an environment where ALL developers are in one location and ALL of your infrastructure team are the other side of the world is going to be a real challenge. To resolve this problem, ensure one / more developers work from infrastructure team location during release time. |
| Sponsor | Wide decision-making power The active and regular implication from the Business Partner is a strongAgile principle. Beyond the technical implementation, the Agile method is fostering team spirit and a strong collaboration. In Agile, the business partner has an even stronger involvement that helps him to raise the correct questions and to focus on the essentials. He is participating periodically to agile ritual and has to test the product, to ensure the correct adequacy with the client request and the quality of the delivered product. The business, more solicited, can build a team or delegate his role to one or several « business representative ». |
| Delivery Manager ( Vendor) | Responsible for maintaining India capabilities for delivering the services in most efficient manner Responsible for operational performance of services from the India Delivery Center Ensure that the end user and client manager experience in working with offshore is at par with that of working with onshore. Ensure that global Service Delivery Processes and Procedures are implemented and followed by India delivery team |
CategoriesAgile