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.