Establish Roles and Responsibilities

A critical first step in managing data is determining individual roles and responsibilities, which should include contacts for obtaining information on a project, product, or source data.

Explicitly identify a person or position in the following roles:

1. Project Manager: This role is held by a FWS employee and may be synonymous with the project’s principal investigator, responsible for the management of the project and all associated data products. The Project Manager is responsible for ensuring that the project performance is as described in the project and data management plans. It is the responsibility of the Project Manager to perform any necessary tasks if a particular required role is not explicitly identified. This role is responsible for project metadata creation.

2. Principal Investigator: This role may or may NOT be held by a FWS employee which is common for cooperative projects. The Principal Investigator, like the project manager, is responsible for the management of the project and all associated data products.

3. Data Originator(s): The person(s) generating/collecting data, responsible for data they collect, author or generate. The data originator is responsible for following best practices for the data type and for product metadata creation.

4. Data Custodian: The person responsible for the management of the project archive folder. This is most likely your program data manager.

5. Data Steward: The subject-matter expert(s) responsible for ensuring that data products are clean and tidy and documentation and metadata are complete. The data steward is responsible for building the project-product associations between metadata records.

6. Data Trustee: An upper level position in the organization who has the ultimate responsibility for ensuring that the allocation of resources (e.g. staff and funding) are adequate to allow for the completion of all aspects of data management. The trustee also has the ultimate responsibility to ensure the application of governance policies to the project and resultant data resources. The trustee will most likely not be involved with data management, but rather with data governance.

Note: An individual may fill many roles. Often the Project Manager covers all of the roles, with the exception of Data Trustee. It is best practice for the Project Manager and the Data Steward to be different individuals, however project-staffing levels may not allow for this.