When you get together to plan your project, one of the things you will want to do is to decide on who does what.  Each team member will have strengths that make them better suited for some tasks then others.  How do you determine these strengths and decide on responsibilities?  Here’s an approach you can use.

1. Ask each team member to evaluate himself/herself on each of the project needs shown on Exhibit 1.
2. Evaluate the team needs for each task as shown in Exhibit 2.
3. Make initial assignments.  Do this by finding all tasks that require a strong ability and there are one or more team members who have a strong ability in that category.  See if you can find one name for each task with a strong ability.
4. Finalize assignments

• Assign every team member a primary task
• Assign two or more people to a task if needed
• If any task has no one with a strong ability, select someone with a moderate ability.

  Exhibit 3 is an illustration of how this can work.

Before you finalize assignments, you want to see if someone would like to take on an assignment where they want to develop skills.

Exhibit 1

Team Member Strengths

Indicate skill levels as follows

S = Strong Ability

M = Moderate Ability

L = Limited Ability

Exhibit 2

Team Needs/ Strengths

Tasks*

* Indicate the degree each need is required for each tasks

L = Limited Ability

M = Moderate Ability

S = Strong Ability

Exhibit 3

Team Assignments

Tasks*

 .