Team membership and roles

Author

Gabriel I. Cook

Team Roles

Project roles help streamline events, assist delegation, allow for some accountability, and reduce workload overlap. Project roles are designed to help keep the project organized and reduce confusion about what project elements team members are taking on. Team roles should be decided upon in a way that maximizes member ability so that task demands are equal across team members. These roles provide some guidelines but do not obviate members from contributing to and participating in other tasks subsumed under specific roles. In other words, when the Project Manager falls ill, another team member should step up to facilitate any necessary communication to me. Likewise, the Coding Lead would step in to help the Writing Lead revise writing when necessary. Similarly, the Writing Lead or Project Manager should help the Coding Lead with organizing code when appropriate. All team members have have the same goal, which is to develop code, commit code on GitHub weekly, and communicate the project to me any audience. Thus, all team members will write code, organize content, and write website content. Each member may take lead on sections with which they are most familiar or most qualified in addressing to be determined by the team.

If the team decides to create roles different from those suggested below, please just let me know.

Suggested Roles:

1. Project Manager (PM): The project manager helps with organization of the project and is the point person for communication.

  • Communicating the team meeting time and location to me;
  • Communicating with course faculty (and any liaison(s));
  • Scheduling and reminding the team meetings (and meetings with any liaisons);
  • Assigning tasks to team members (with help from course professor is needed) and based on the project requirements;
  • Monitoring and keeping track of each member’s project progress;
  • Motivating the team members on their task completion and future goals;
  • Dealing with any conflicts within the team and updating any concerns with course professor;
  • Coordinating team activities such as presentation dry runs;
  • Helping maintain equity of tasks across all team members, inclusion the PM;
  • The Project Manager is not responsible to reminding team members to complete their tasks or complete worklogs.

2. Design/Reporting Lead (RL): The design/reporting lead(s) helps with organization of the reporting documents (e.g., pageslides, report) and revision of writing.

  • 1 or 2 members
  • Planning, guiding, and leading the design of a site and writing (e.g., _quarto.yml structure or .Rmd report document files);
  • Doing background/external research on topic as relevant;
  • Assigning website pages (.qmd files) for appropriate members to build;
  • Keeping track of the website page development and progress;
  • Helping develop a data story line and ensure the pages make sense with that story;
  • Formatting, text, images, inline code (R code embedded in text if relevant), and tables on final document (RMarkdown for final report);
  • The Design/Reporting Team is not responsible to all writing and page building nor proofreading/editing pages.

3. Coding Co-Lead (CL): The coding co-lead(s) helps with organization and management of the project code elements (e.g., project, code, associated files, GitHub repo (recommended)).

  • 2 members best
  • Creating and maintaining organization of the project code (e.g., directories, sourced scripts, etc.)
  • Leading coding and code documenting;
  • Assigning technical tasks to other team members;
  • Keeping track of the progress of the technical tasks;
  • Helping other team members troubleshoot code (see also TA and course professor);
  • Communicating with PM and course professor regarding any technical needs and concerns;
  • Communicating with RL regarding messaging of coded results;
  • Maintaining GitHub repo (making sure teammates are pushing work to remote repo);
  • Seeking help about GitHub from me, our dedicated QCL support person, or the QCL team generally;
  • The Coding Team is not responsible for all coding nor all Git tasks.

Based on abilities and interests of team members, the team should determine how many individuals to assign to a given role, or determine other appropriate roles given the abilities of the team members. There should be unanimity in these decisions. I will not assign you to roles.