Roles and Responsibilities

Roles and Responsibilities

What is a Roles & Responsibilities workshop?

This tactic helps you to better understand each other’s role, and learn who is responsible for what.

Defining clear responsibilities prevents confusion around hierarchy and expertise. It reduces duplicate work and promotes better collaboration.

Running Skills Market beforehand will help a new team get to know each other. This tactic also works well with Stakeholder Map for giving your team a clear picture of each other and those around them.


Roles and Responsibilities Miro Template


How to run a Roles & Responsibilities workshop

1. On a large surface, such as a whiteboard, create a column for each discipline within the team. For example: Designer, Developer and Product Owner.

2. Create three rows: Do, Discuss, Decide.

3. On sticky notes, to build empathy - ask each person to complete the three rows for the discipline of the person sat to their left:

Do: what are the core activities of their discipline?

Discuss: what do they discuss with the wider team?

Decide: what are they responsible for deciding?

4. In turn - stick up your notes, then share and discuss what has been written down.

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4, but this time with the participant’s own discipline to help create clarity.

6. As a group, move, refine and add sticky notes until everyone is happy with the roles and responsibilities.

Roles and Responsibilities

Origin: Lee Connolly, 2019

Not sure if this is the right approach for your team at the moment? Try a different tactic for understanding the problems and challenges you face. Or if you’re happy that you know what the next big challenge is for your team, try a framing tactic to help you articulate your problem, ready for solving.

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Roles and Responsibilities is one of 54 workshop recipe cards inside the Workshop Tactics card deck.

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