How to Facilitate Agile Chartering for Context

Now that you have a rough-draft purpose and have facilitated alignment within the team, you’ll next develop the first draft of context. Bring key stakeholders into the conversation about boundaries and interactions if you can, as they have important perspectives to share. Bring the sponsor back for the discussion of committed resources. As with alignment, there’s no rough draft. You’ll lead the team through boundaries and interactions, committed resources, and prospective analysis.

Conducting the Team Chartering Workshop for Context

Following is a sample agenda for a one-day team chartering work session focusing on context (step 5).

Sample Agenda (Context)

1. Welcome and introductions

2. Review the agenda

3. Review and revise the draft purpose

4. Facilitate alignment

5. Facilitate context

   • Map boundaries and interactions

   • Validate committed resources

   • Conduct a prospective analysis

   • Compare the context with the Goodness Checklist for Context

6. Clarify the next steps and wrap up

Activity 1: Establish Boundaries and Interactions

To discover the boundaries of your team and its work, dig deep. Explore the lines of decision-making authority. Consider time limits. Discuss relationships among lines of business, departments, and functional areas. Examine communication needs and system interfaces. Focus on creating the fullest description of the team’s boundary and the greater whole. Represent all the ways and places that team members will define what’s in and what’s out of the team’s scope of work.

Collaborate to develop a visible, tangible context diagram for the core team. Make it big. Use a whole whiteboard or a whole wall! Context diagrams depict your understanding of system boundaries. They show working relationships. You’ll illustrate the chartering group’s expectations for interactions.

To create the diagram, start with a large area of a clean whiteboard. If you don’t have access to a whiteboard, use several flip chart pages taped together, or cover a wall in paper if necessary. Draw a circle (or use a sticky note) in the middle to represent your core team. Within this boundary lies the core team’s authority and responsibility. Write the team’s name on the circle.

Next, use sticky-note brainstorming (that is, one idea per sticky note). Invite everyone to think broadly about all of the other parties the team will connect with over the course of development. Some parties will give inputs to the team, some will receive outputs, and some will do both.

When you think you’ve identified all the parties, post the sticky notes around the core team circle. Place parties with similar interactions together. Draw arrows between the inner circle and the various parties to show the direction of the interaction or exchange. (You can also use sticky notes as arrows if you’re working on flip chart pages instead of a whiteboard.) Label each arrow with the name of whatever moves between the two. It might be information, supplies, forms of assistance, and so on.

Resist perfecting the diagram. Remember GEFN (Good Enough for Now)—one of the simple rules of agile team chartering as described in ​Simple Rules for Agile Chartering​. Make it useful, not comprehensive. Focus primarily on parties’ relationships and interactions with the core team. Include relationships and interactions among other parties only as time allows.

While viewing the context diagram, ask these questions:

• Are all the parties represented in the diagram aware of their roles regarding this work?

• If they’re aware, do we share a common understanding about the nature and timing of our transactions (such as a product review meetings schedule)?

• If they aren’t aware, how will we contact them and what communication do we need?

• Which of these parties have primary roles? Which are more secondary?

• Given these parties, what authority does our team need to meet our accountabilities and responsibilities?

• What needs to happen for our team to gain any missing authority it needs to create business value?

Look for areas of the diagram where the parties or interactions aren’t yet clear to everyone in the room. Include areas you aren’t sure about, haven’t thought about yet, need to rethink assumptions about, or all of these. Identify and clarify time boundaries that will affect the core team. Include due dates, initial release plans, and iteration lengths.

Develop initial ideas for how you’ll give and receive information. Discuss how you’ll ensure follow-through where needed. Communication can take many forms. Your team might use visible information radiators, instant messages, emails, phone calls, meetings, formal sign-offs, reports, presentations, or many other transaction modes.

Start by asking what people need, how they’d like to get it, and how frequently they need it. For example, a product owner might say, “My sales reps need updated information about features to discuss with prospective buyers. They’d like monthly emailed reports on what’s included in the next release plans.” The team might respond, “Okay, we’ll make sure we include feature updates in our sprint reviews, so you can include those in your reports. We’ll invite you and the sales reps to all the product demos, so you can both have hands-on knowledge about the product as it’s developed.”

Activity 2: Identify Committed Resources

The chartering group works together on committed resources. You’ll help the team identify the material and intangible resources (not people) needed to achieve the team mission and then clarify the business’s current level of commitment to providing them. Everyone comes to the chartering session with ideas about resource needs, including the sponsor.

Start the session by having the sponsor present her ideas about resources she intends to commit. Facilitate an exchange of ideas between the sponsor and the rest of the team.

Next, the core team and stakeholders should present their own lists of resource needs. Clarify various types of resources and how each will help the core team create value. Look for similarities and differences across the lists. Prioritize the resources into must-have, desirable, nice-to-have, and can-live-without. Agree on the initial what we know now about what we’ll need and when list.

Discuss when and how details of resource acquisition will occur. For missing resources, help the group uncover the source and process to get them. Agree on how to handle the situation if needs change. For example, whom does the core team approach to discuss additional or unexpected resource needs?

Finally, your sponsor then needs to commit to providing resources or decide to abandon or postpone the project. If the sponsor isn’t present, the product manager and team coach should work with the team on a plan to ensure the flow of resources in the order needed.

Activity 3: Conduct a Prospective Analysis

This activity gives your chartering group its first opportunity to look ahead together. You help it explore the future landscape. Agile chartering facilitators use many different techniques for this exploration of opportunities and threats. Many teams take time to review their purpose early in their work. Some teams spend time on team-building and alignment. Few teams invest in looking forward, so few receive the benefits of this context.

An effective way to conduct prospective analysis is by creating a prospective chart, which visually outlines the teams’ assumptions about future risks and benefits. To create this chart, first divide the team up into pairs. Then ask each pair to make assumptions about the future and write down all possible events they can imagine that might roll out over the next two to three months. Use sticky notes, writing one event per note. Include events with both positive and negative effects on the team’s work.

Many groups have difficulty thinking of positive possibilities. It’s easy for people to think of potential threats and risks. Make sure the group also envisions emerging opportunities such as: we deliver two months before expected; everyone gets a bonus; or something we discover has potential for broader use.

Next, use the following four brainstorming guidelines to create as many sticky notes as possible:

• Focus on quantity of ideas over quality of ideas.

• Build on others’ ideas.

• Withhold judgment until you have the whole list.

• Explore wild ideas.

Ask each pair to contribute at least four events in five to seven minutes.

While pairs work to generate possible events, create a large grid on a whiteboard or flip chart. Create the impact scale along the y-axis and the likelihood scale on the x-axis, as shown in the following diagram.

Next, have each group individually assess each event on two dimensions:

• What is the impact (beneficial or detrimental) to the project on a scale of +3, +2, +1, 0, -1, -2, -3?

• What is the likelihood of each occurring on a continuum scale of (left to right) won’t happen, 50/50 chance, or will happen?

Plot all sticky notes on the grid. Where pairs may have identified the same idea and plotted it in a different spot on the grid, discuss the discrepancy.

Finally, review the completed grid. Focus first on high-probability/-3 events. Discuss mitigation or elimination strategies. Focus second on high-probability/+3 events. Discuss how you will take advantage of them. Third, focus on possible/+3 events. Discuss how the team can put energy into making those more likely to occur.

Prioritize the events you want to track. Decide which other areas of the grid deserve the team’s attention. Ask, “Is it a good use of team time to discuss a low probability/low negative impact event?” Work your way across the grid until you’ve dealt with all the high-priority events. Agree on how you’ll identify triggers and how you’ll monitor each event you want to track.

Activity 4: Compare Context to the Goodness Checklist

Before committing to your boundaries and interactions, committed resources, and prospective analysis, take a few minutes to compare your work on clarifying context to the questions in the Goodness Checklist for Context:

• Does your diagram, or other description, of the team’s boundaries provide an adequate picture of the greater whole system for the team? Does it make the team’s organizational relationships visible?

• Has the team discussed the boundaries that expand or limit its decision-making authority and work responsibilities? Do shared understandings include differing perspectives on the system?

• Has the team clarified the key and critical ways it will interact with the larger system and the nature of those interactions?

• Has everyone discovered something surprising in this activity?

• Have team members listed their critical resource (nonhuman) needs, both tangible and intangible? Have they acknowledged what they have on hand?

• Has the sponsor committed to getting the team everything it needs to do its work? Has the team identified the path for sourcing missing resources?

• Did your team consider everyone’s perspective in looking ahead? Did it remember and imagine a three-month rolling view of obstacles, opportunities, and other things that might affect the team?

• Did team members highlight where they can make a difference in their future? Did they focus on how they can proactively encourage or mitigate events?

Ensure that you and the team can answer Yes! to these questions. If you’re unsure, keep working on them. Don’t go on to the next activity until you feel satisfied that your team’s sense of its context will serve the team well enough to get started on (or continue) its work.