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The Team Charter
What is the Team Charter? It’s a document that establishes the team values, agreements and operating guidelines for the team. A team charter establishes clear expectations regarding acceptable behavior by the project team members, and usually it’s created as a team collaboratively, so everyone has a bit of an input and everyone agrees on the Team Charter and how they want the team to work going forward.
What is in a Team Charter?
The Team Charter might include (but it’s not limited to) team values, communication guidelines (so how are we going to communicate?). Is it via email, is it via Slack? Is it via meetings, do we have a daily stand up? Those sorts of things.
Decision-making criteria and process – who needs to sign off on things?
Conflict resolution – what happens if something goes wrong?
Meeting guidelines – are we showing up early or showing up late? Can we miss the standup if it’s something important? Or do we have to be at every stand up in the morning?
And then team agreements in general.
It also answers these questions: Why are we doing this project? or why is this team here? Who benefits from the project? What does done mean? or how do we know when we’re finished? How are we going to work together?
A servant leader from Agile may facilitate this chartering process and as a servant leader their aim is to coach the team through this process, where everyone has an input and it’s not just someone dictating it from the top. A team charter can be reviewed and updated periodically to ensure continued understanding of the team ground rules and to orient and integrate new team members (similarly to a Retrospective). What that means is every two or four weeks we look back on our process and we say you know what worked well, what didn’t work well, what still puzzles me, what have I learned. We can also review the team charter and make sure that it’s still up to scratch. Do we want to add anything? Do we want to take away anything? Do we want to change any of the ways that we work as a team?
And that is the team charter.
– David McLachlan