PMO Roles and Responsibilities (R&R)

Role and Responsibility (R & R&R) identifies relationships between functional areas (role) and the person responsible for the function delivery. Roles are also referred to as one's position in a project team. Responsibilities often are defined as duties or job descriptions. 

​Specifying a clear role and responsibility for a project team is a critical PMO practice, which helps teams void stepping on each other, thus reducing conflicts. The following is an example role and responsibility definition: 

• ​​Portfolio Managers manage strategic relationships with businesses with oversight of all projects. 
• Product Managers define and articulate the product roadmap and own product quality and capability.
• Project Managers are responsible for the project delivery. It's vital to clarify project management role is a facilitating role. They don't own the product roadmap or business case nor need to decide what to do in every sprint. They clarify, understand, plan, organize and execute but do not prioritize nor define project scope. 
• Business Analysts liaise with the business to capture, detail, and fulfill business requirements.
• Technical Managers lead the delivery team to deliver a portfolio of products & solutions.
  • Technical Functional Lead (Application Lead): Single point of responsibility for delivery of all technical elements to the stated requirements
  • Technical Lead/Developer: Develops code to agreed standards, quality, and timelines
  • Solution Architect: Defines the end-to-end product architecture and associated integration across different components or technologies
• Operations Managers improve the stability and effectiveness of production environments. Serves needs by ticket, so no one individual is assigned to each project.
  • Operations Engineer: Maintains infrastructure health and provides framework support
• Frameworks Managers are responsible for the roadmap and health of a frameworks and for ensuring that the frameworks is fit-for-purpose 
  • Framework Engineer: Develops and maintains frameworks
  • Framework Project Manager: Responsible for the oversight of development and maintenance of frameworks

It is totally fine for a person to carry multiple roles and responsibilities in practice. Some projects don't need all the functions. The importance of this exercise is the full coverage of the commitments and clarity of each person's expectations in the project.

Question to Ask When Clarifying Role and Responsibilities 

• Do we have missing roles in the project? If so, who will play that role and what is the expectation?