It’s important to establish a unique identity for a team and the values they deem most important to their own success for delivery. The team’s success largely depends on the roles and norms that agile coaches help establish for the team, empowering people to find their place within the culture that has been established.
There’s a growing body of evidence from team psychology that shows team charters contribute positively to performance [1], including:
Team performance early in a team’s live is reliant on the development of effective short-term processes that help individuals bond and create relationships, structure, and focus that it deliver [2].
The purpose of a team charter is to systematically establish many of the necessary ground rules for team meetings, interactions, and performance. You should run a team charter event when the team is first established, or when there have been so many new people added to the team that it’s time for a reboot.
Timebox: 30 minutes.
The charter should cover at the bare minimum the items following:
Why did your team form? What types of products or services does it deliver?
Download the Team Charter Canvas (PDF) to print and use in this team setup activity.
1. Aaron, J. R., McDowell, W.C., and Herdman, A. O. (2014) The Effects of a Team Charter on Student Team Behaviors. The Journal of Education for Business 89(2):90-97
2. Dowling, K. (2003). Chartering your team for peak performance. In M. M.Beyerlein, C. McGee, D. Klein, J. E. Nemiro, & L. Broedling (Eds.), The collaborative work systems fieldbook (pp. 77–87). San Francisco, CA:Wiley