Technical Leader

Definition

Technical Leader

the role that is played when a person provides techical leadership on an endeavor

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Technical Leader is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Engineer
• Subclasses:
  • None

Responsibilities

The typical role-specific responsibilities of a Technical Leader are to:

• Technically lead the project team.
• Provide technical vision, thought leadership, and a global view of the application.
• Identify required human resources and evaluate potential technical team members.
• Act as “domain expert” with regard to technology issues.
• Ensures that the non-managerial staff follow the project process or obtain waivers (if appropriate).
• Coordinate the evaluation of all COTS components and their vendors.
• Coordinate the evaluation of all non-managerial project deliverables.
• Explain major technical decisions and their rationales to management, the development staff, and the customer representatives.
• Earn the respect of the management team, the development staff, and the customer representatives.

Technical leader typically inherit the general role responsibilities from the role process component.

Expertise

To fulfill these responsibilities, technical leaders typically should have the following expertise, training, and experience:

• Excellent communication skills with management, customer representatives, domain experts, and members of the project team.
• Excellent team building and leadership skills.
• Able to technically provide strategic direction and oversight to members of the project team.
• Ability to know when to follow the process and when to obtain waivers.
• Able to technically mentor all members of the project team.
• Highly self-directed and proactive.
• Able to prioritize, multitask, and make critical decisions given incomplete and conflicting knowledge.
• Solid knowledge of project requirements, architecture, design, implementation, and testing.
• Deep knowledge of project technologies.

Tasks

Technical leaders typically perform the following role-specific tasks in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and time-boxed manner:

• Technically lead endeavor team.
• Mentor members of the endeavor team.

Technical leaders typically inherit common role tasks from the role process component.

Teams

Technical leaders typically perform these tasks as members of the following teams:

• Project Team
• Environments Evaluation Team
• Strategy Evaluation Team
• Requirements Evaluation Team
• Architecture Evaluation Team
• Software Evaluation Team
• Database Evaluation Team
• Test Evaluation Team
• Deployment Evaluation Team

Work Products

As members of these teams, technical leaders typically produce all or part of the following work products:

• Status Report (technical status)

Guidelines

• Unless the endeavor is very large and complex, the person who plays the technical leader role often also plays other roles such as system or software architect.
• The technical leader should collaborate closely with the project manager, technical leader responsible for technical issues while the project manager is responsible for administrative issues.
• The technical leader must be given the authority to make final decisions on technical issues, as long as they are consistent with business constraints.