Role
- Role
- a low-level
indirect producer
that models a part that is played by (i.e., a cohesive collection of responsibilities of) one or more
persons on an
endeavor
As illustrated in the preceding figure, roles are part of the following inheritance hierarchy.
Each role typically has the following common responsibilities:
- Produce high quality work products.
- Iterate and improve the work products whenever
practical.
- Develop reusable intellectual capital.
- Understand and follow the endeavor-specific process.
- Stay current with relevant industry advances and trends.
- Maintain and increase his or her required expertise by:
- Reading appropriate technical journals and books.
- Attending relevant conferences, tutorials, and training
courses.
- Personal study (e.g., learning a new programming
language by using it to program small software
components).
- Take part in relevant development and inspection
teams.
- Collaborate professionally with other team members.
- Request changes to, and report defects in, work
products.
- Provide good faith effort estimates for performing
required tasks.
- Provide input for regular team status reports.
- Be honest, have integrity, and maintain confidentiality
at all times.
- Work to resolve conflicts or differences of opinion by
finding areas of agreement that benefit the stakeholder
organizations and individuals.
- Develop and maintain friendly, professional, and
supportive relationships and networks of contacts with people
and organizations who are or might be, useful in achieving
work-related goals.
- Provide constructive, timely and specific feedback to others.
- Show a genuine intent in fostering the learning or
development of others.
- Participate effectively in group discussions and
activities, while also encouraging others to do the same.
- Facilitates meetings effectively, deciding when to
advocate, and when to compromise to arrive at mutually
acceptable decisions and solutions.
- Seek opportunities to implement innovative new ideas,
tools, and techniques.
- Ensure that objectives of self and team are aligned with
business goals and the mission of the endeavor.
- Have good communication skills:
- Communicate effectively by responding to his or her
audience so that information is clearly conveyed.
- Communicate specialist or technical information in
terms that the audience can understand.
- Present information persuasively, analyzing and
summarizing the key issues, specifying the benefits and
drawbacks of the issues, and supporting a point of view
with valid, logical arguments.
- Use the full range of active listening skills, picking
up underlying verbal and non-verbal messages and questions.
Each role typically performs the following common tasks:
For each role, the OPEN Process Framework specifies the
following information:
- Definition of the role.
- Responsibilities (both role-specific and general) of the role.
- Expertise, training, or experience required to perform the role.
- Tasks performed by the role.
- Teams in which the role takes part.
- Work products produced by the role.
- Role-specific guidelines.
- General Guidelines:
- “Computer programming is a human
activity.” Gerald Weinberg, 1971.
- The same person can simultaneously play multiple
roles within a single team.
- The same person can also play different roles on
different teams.
- A single person typically plays multiple related
roles simultaneously on a project.
- A single person typically plays different roles at
different times during a project.
- A single person may play roles on multiple
projects.
- A single role can be played by multiple persons,
especially on larger projects.
- Construction Guidelines for constructing a
project-specific process from the OPF:
- Every project will not require every role, although
each role should be considered.
- Choose the reusable roles in the repository to use
(i.e., instantiate) based the types of work products to be
produced, the responsibilities of the on selected roles,
and project management's ability to manage large numbers of
roles.
- Because OPF is a general (and therefore relatively
complete) framework, its class repository contains a very
large number of roles that can be somewhat daunting to
managers and process engineers on small projects. Although
one might be tempted to merge several roles into one
overall role on small projects, such roles lose their
cohesiveness and require large amounts of redocumentation.
Remember that a single person typically plays multiple
roles.
- Document the selection of roles in the description of
the project-specific process.
- Extension Guidelines for extending the
repository with a new role:
- Ensure that each new type of role is cohesive in terms
of its definition and responsibilities.
- Ensure that each new role is internally consistent:
- The role’s responsibilities are consistent with
the role's name.
- The role’s tasks are consistent with the role's
responsibilities.
- The role’s work products are produced by the
role's tasks.
- Ensure that each new role is externally consistent in
that its responsibilities do not overlap the
responsibilities of existing roles.
- Ensure that each new type of role is adequately
documented using the standard topics.
- Tailoring Guidelines for modifying a selected
role to meet the specific needs of an endeavor:
- Tailoring can happen at any time during the endeavor:
- At the beginning of the endeavor when the
endeavor-specific process is being constructed.
- During the process as situations change and lessons
are learned.
- Modify the definition as appropriate.
- Add, modify, or delete responsibilities as
appropriate.
- Add, modify, or delete tasks as appropriate.
- Add, modify, or delete work products as
appropriate.
- Because OPF is a relatively complete framework, it
often contains process components that are not needed on
every project. Thus, tailoring more often involves deletion
of unnecessary elements than additions or modifications
(e.g., process engineers must often delete work products
that are not going to be produced during the
endeavor).
- Document your tailoring decisions in the description of
the project-specific process.
