Team Charter
Basic
difficulty
Stage 1
Agile IQ® Level
Team Setup
Practices
Agile Manifesto
Framework
Introduction
A team charter is a document that is developed in a group setting that clarifies team direction while establishing boundaries. It is developed early during the forming of the team. The charter should be developed in a group session to encourage understanding and buy-in.
Purpose
The team charter has a number of purposes.
Identity
A good team charter makes the team's identity and its purpose transparent for everyone to see.
Rules
How do team members expect others to behave? How will team members keep each other to account for delivery? A good team charter details the rules by which its members will behave.
Making Decisions
How does your team make decisions? Simple majority vote? Roman vote? What happens when a team member doesn't like the decision? Write some examples in your team charter. Remember, some rules and decisions are outside of the team's control. The team can't, for example, vote to stop doing Daily Scrum. If it's not effective, work out as a team how to make it effective.
Celebrating Wins
When the team delivers against a deadline how does it celebrate? What does the team do for birthdays, religious holidays, government holidays? Investing the required time to develop a charter reduces confusion about the group’s objectives. The charter also provides the information needed to reduce the risk of rework, enabling the team to get it right the first time.
Actions
Setting up the Team Charter
Timebox: 1 hour
Using the 1-2-4-All pattern from Liberating Structures is an effective mechanism to quickly gain consensus from the team about its identity, rules, and social agreement.
- Hand out sticky-notes to all team members.
- 1 minute: Ask everyone to silent brainstorm ideas about the team’s “Mission”.
- 2 minutes: Ask team members to form pairs and share the ideas they wrote down.
- 4 minutes: Ask pairs to ‘pair up’ (groups of 4) and share what they’ve written. Identify any gaps and write those down.
- 5 minutes: Gather together all of the sticky notes on a wall. Cluster the items that are similar (affinity mapping). Discuss the groupings and dot vote on the one phrase/area that best describes the team’s mission.
Repeat for each section of the Team Canvas.
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