Roles and responsibilities is a team-building activity that aims to map out the responsibilities among the team roles. It helps them better define their roles and responsibilities  and avoid future conflicts due to unclear responsibilities or expectations.

Running the activity:

  1. Create a list of all possible responsibilities and place it under the first column, and name it Responsibilities
  2. Create a list of all the team members’ roles (for example: SM, PO, Dev team), and use these as titles for the subsequent columns (for example: Responsibilities – SM – PO –  Dev team)
  3. Ask a participant to choose one item from the Responsibilities column and move it under a role column, indicating the role has such responsibility. Duplicate the item if more than one role has the same responsibility.
  4. Group conversation about the role and responsibility.
  5. Go back to step 3 until all responsibilities are covered.

 

The goal in completing the activity is to find the most complete picture of team roles and responsibilities. This activity is similar to the Roles and Expectations activity, although it is more straight-forward when clarifying the responsibilities of pre-defined roles such as, in our example, the Scrum Roles and Responsibilities.

 

Remote-team advice: This activity works well for remote teams. Use a remote board of your choice.

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Please find below a sample list of responsibilities (step 1) for a Scrum team:

  • Attend Sprint Planning
  • Attend Sprint Review
  • Attend Daily Scrum
  • Attend Sprint Retrospective
  • Prioritise Product Backlog
  • Refine Product Backlog Items
  • Design a Product Backlog Item
  • Build a Product Backlog Item
  • Test a Product Backlog Item
  • Integrate software
  • Deploy a product increment
  • Improve process
  • Improve technical practices
  • Talk to stakeholders
  • Talk to Users
  • Track progress of the Sprint
  • Make the Product Backlog visible to all
  • Create Product backlog items
  • Resolve Technical impediments
  • Resolve organisational impediments
  • Facilitate Scrum events
  • Ensure Scrum rules are followed
  • Coach team members
  • Track progress of the product increment
  • Track progress of the Sprint goal