Project roles discovery

Question

I have a school project in which we're going to write a financial engine prototype by a group of 4 people. Most of us have never met each other before, so I'm trying to create a questionnaire to help us find the appropriate roles for each team-member.

We have the following responsibilities:

• Database design
• Programming
• User interface design
• Training
• Documentation / technical writing
• Network design
• Project management
• Business analysis
• Testing

And we have the following roles:

• Project Manager
• Developer
• Tester
• Business Analyst

Our group has people with various experience: a full-time graduate student, an associate director at the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), full-time professionals, etc.

Do any of you know of any tools that would help build a questionnaire or do you have a reference to an online questionnaire that can help us identify the most suitable role(s) for each team member?

Answer 1

i think you already have a questionnaire in the works. Simply use the bullet list you presented in your question above. Print it out and ask the project members to put a check mark by the roles they're interested in.

Then be prepared to throw the result out the window. It's entirely possible that once you all meet each other and start talking that you'll naturally fall into particular roles and they be very different from what you sketch out ahead of time.

There's four of you. Don't overthink it. It's good to get a feel for everyone ahead of time but it's also good to play it loose and adjust as the team dynamic crystallizes, and it will.

Sample Questionnaire:

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What are you interests when it comes to software development projects? (Check all that apply)

Responsibilities:

[ ] Database design

[ ] Programming

[ ] User interface design

[ ] Training

[ ] Documentation / technical writing

[ ] Network design

[ ] Project management

[ ] Business analysis

[ ] Testing

Roles:

[ ] Project Manager

[ ] Developer

[ ] Tester

[ ] Business Analyst