Tips13: Classification and Properties of Roles

As described in Knowing your team members and setting roles, the roles of individual team members are called roles in Project Sprint. Also, as explained in the section on setting up roles that are easy to use in practice, in Project Sprint, there is no set role that must be set except for the meeting role, and the only requirement for defining roles is that team members must agree on them.

However, this "team member agreement" is not always explicit. In other words, while there are roles that are named and shared by the team, such as "Team Management" and "Process Admin" described in Tip 5, there are also implicit roles that are naturally assumed by certain members as the project progresses. In Project Sprint, the former are called "explicit roles" and the latter are called "implicit roles".

These distinctions are not absolute, and it is possible for an implicit role to become an explicit role for some reason.

For example, implicit roles rarely work well from the start. For example, implicit roles rarely work well from the beginning, i.e., the tacit understanding that "he will do this" does not work well in the early stages of a team. In many cases, these tacit roles are once expressed as explicit roles, "This person has this role," and in this process, the expectations are matched. After that, the implicit roles begin to function as well, saying, "This person has this role, so he will do this as well. When the expectations of team members are aligned, they will be able to cope with unknown situations more effectively.

The ratio of implicit roles to explicit roles varies from project to project and from team to team, and the optimal balance is different for each. In addition, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of whether more or fewer roles are better.

However, it is desirable for roles to be in the following state

• The more fine-grained the understanding among team members of what needs to be done in the role, the better.

• The more roles that are necessary and sufficient for the team are shared in a way that is least costly to the team, the better.

• The more they can follow up with each other on what needs to be done in each role, the better.