Roles and Responsibilities

[M.Faizan Nadeem]

Play: Roles & Responsibilities

Why I intend to run it:

Clear understanding of who is responsible for what can prevent confusion, reduce overlap, and improve accountability within the team. Our team has grown recently, and with overlapping duties, there’s been some uncertainty around ownership of tasks and decision-making. Running the Roles & Responsibilities play will help us clarify expectations and boost team performance.

How I plan to run it:

I'll schedule a 60-minute session where each team member will list their current responsibilities and then we’ll map them together using a shared whiteboard or template. We’ll discuss overlaps, gaps, and misalignments, and refine roles to suit our current goals and strengths. Finally, we’ll document everything and make it accessible for future reference.

Advice to the Atlassian Community:

Don’t assume everyone’s clear on roles—even in well-established teams. Running this play opens up valuable conversations and often reveals hidden blockers. It’s a great way to strengthen trust and collaboration.

[Stephen_Lugton]

We recently found that a number of our staff didn't have job descriptions on file, so our ITSM manager went through a similar exercise to work out what everyone was doing and create role descriptions out of it. 

I was one of those who's job description wasn't on record, but I had a copy of it from when I joined the company; the new role description was so far more than my actual job description that I refused to sign off on it because I wanted my appraisal to be measured against what I was employed to do rather than what I do on top of that.

So if you're doing this kind of thing make sure that the roles and responsibilities you're now creating are used as the achievement rather than the expectation for reviews etc.