Aligning as a team with a team working agreement.

What’s a team working agreement? A team working agreement is a lightweight document, formed and reviewed by all members as a from of agreement as to their practices, behaviours, values and ways of working.

As a practice it is a good activity to create as a team when a team forms OR when changes occur as far as team makeup OR as a periodic review. The real value is having the conversation as a team and aligning how you work and what you expect of each other.

Thinking about your team- when did you all get the chance to review your ways of working together- what are the columns on your board, what does 'done' mean? If you can`t remember or if you feel the team may have a different answer for these topics, it may be a great time to review as a team.

Why is that useful? This is a useful activity because it aligns and unifies the team on how they work and what to expect from each other. It can be documented in some way for new members of the team and referred to periodically as a review. Ask what suits the team best (something visual is great- is a long wordy list of stuff really that inviting?).

Creating this:

New teams or teams who have not reviewed their practices for some time may find it useful to have multiple workshops on this or a regular cadence through something like a team ways of working session.

Using a remote collaboration tool, a facilitator may choose areas of focus to guide conversation. You can also feed off discussions in a retrospective as inspiration (for example if it is observed the team feel they need to have a deeper conversation on how they collaborate on their work or how their board is set up).

Some areas of focus could be:

• Team events: what are our team events, when are they, who attends, whats the intended outcome? What do we do and what do we avoid?

• How do we communicate? eg We use slack generally, but when we start a new backlog item we have a huddle and do a kick off call via zoom.

• Work types and states? What work types do we create and handle, how do we handle each of these types and what are their states (links to the board below).

• Our team board: what does each column mean, do we have an agreement on the criteria we apply to how the work goes into each and goes out? How do we handle changes ?

• What is the minimum amount of info we feel we need in order to work on something?

• What is our acceptance criteria ? what format, how much detail do we want to add?

• How do we slice our work- when is something small enough to work on? (suggestion, 2 or 3 days in cycle time is a fair chunk)

• How do we review our code? What does quality mean to us.

• How do we engage with our customers- our feedback loop to understand how our product is performing? What analytics do we have.

• How/who raises bugs and how do we communicate their outcome?

• How do we test and how we perform different types of testing?

• When is something DONE.