Roles on the IT Project Team

Even a Small IT Project is Complicated

• Roles are specialized

• Resources are often matrixed and over-scheduled

• Plenty of potential for bottlenecks

• Plenty of potential for Tower of Babel problems

Confusing welter of IT Project Job Titles

But Really Four Basic Roles, with Variations

• Team Leaders• Project Manager

• VP Engineering

• Agile Coach

• Technical Leaders• Architect

• CTO

• Tech Lead

• Voice of the Customer• Product Owner

• Business Analyst

• Customer

• Implementer• Developer

• DBA

• UI/UX

• QA/Test

• Designer

Team Leader vs. Tech Leader

Team Leader

• Focuses on people

• Focuses on Processes

• Responsible for coherence of the team

• Helps team grow professionally

• Interrupt-Driven• Always on the critical path

Tech Leader

• Focuses on Technology Choices

• Focuses on Constraints

• Responsible for coherence of the product

• Helps team grow technically

• Batch driven• Needs to take time to get things

right

Tech Leader vs. Implementer

Tech Leader

• Needs to understand that (s)he is a leader, not just a lead dog

• Focuses on making the team excellent

• In Agile environments, may run the agile processes

• Knows when to say “no” and when to say “yes”

Implementer

• Needs to respect the tech leadership

• Needs to understand the application domain

• Needs to understand that (s)he is not the domain expert

• Needs permission to be excellent

Three-tier Architecture Breeds Specialization

Specialists: Data-Layer Specialists

• DBA: Understands how to configure and tune databases

• SQL-heads: Specialists in database programming languages• Queries

• Procedures

• Data Scientist: Understands how to “reason” with data• Algorithms

• Predictives

• Learning

Specialists: Presentation-Layer Specialists

• Front-end Developers

• Designers

• UI Specialists

• UX Specialists

• Interaction Specialists

• Growth Hackers

• Content Developers

• Content Managers

Designers vs. Developers

Designers

• 200,870 in U.S. (recent year)

• Median pay: $47,820

• Afraid of:• Databases

• PCs

• Client Revisions

• Fixed-price billing

• Perl

Developers

• 1,336,300 in U.S.

• Median pay: $85,430

• Afraid of:• Server crashes

• .EPS files

• Bosses who don’t code

• Carpal tunnel

SDLC Breeds Specialization

• QA and Test• (later

today)

• Build, Configure, Manage Change• Source

control

• Change control

• Deploy

Specialists: Build and Change Management

• Version control

• Check out/Check in

• Weekly builds->Daily builds->Continuous builds

• Bug tracking and other systems of record

• Systems of real-time communication

• Change management

Specialists: Operations and DevOps

• DevOps: merger of development, QA, and Operations into a continuous process

• “Left shift”: operations move into the development/QA cycle

• “Infrastructure as code”: formal languages for describing servers, configurations, etc.

• DevOps creates new kinds of specialists