This article is a departure from previous columns. Kenton and Ryan role play the stress and friction between a typical product manager and an engineering team lead. This article may make you squirm, but it brings out the issues of teams attempting to do the best thing from completely different perspectives.

There are ever-growing ways to organize your project assets with public domain configuration management tools. There's a mistaken belief that these free software configuration management (SCM) alternatives can be just as powerful as leading commercial tools.

It used to be that a project manager did one thing: manage the success of the project. As IT budgets shrink and job responsibilities expand, there is no such thing as a typical project manager role. You're expected to wear many hats, facilitate human resource issues, become a subject matter expert, and assist with key technical activities.

Without clearly defined roles and responsibilities, actions taken by key project stakeholders may result in project misfires. Kyle shows what you should do to avoid the situation when roles are misunderstood, overlapped, or completely missing.