Keeping the Team Charter Alive

During the liftoff and team chartering, you’ll develop a first draft of documents that’ll support the team. The documents—the team’s first draft charter—will need to grow and evolve along with the team and its understanding of the work. For example, in each element of agile chartering, one part will change most frequently. In purpose, that’s the mission tests. As each test reaches its due date, you’ll evaluate the test and decide whether to put a new one in its place. In alignment, the team is more likely to change working agreements as each beneficial behavior becomes routine. In context, time marches on and the team will need to perform new prospective analyses to stay abreast of risks. Remember to review and update the living documents as new information and conditions arise.

In addition, by demonstrating the importance of learning and continuously improving from the beginning, you reinforce expectations that everyone will continue to develop new skills, knowledge, and understanding of teamwork, customer value, and business value as they develop the product. The liftoff creates a rich environment to focus on collaboration and team development and to emphasize the role of continuous learning and improvement on agile projects.

Remember, liftoffs support the larger effort of the project. Always work to improve your liftoffs to find ways to capture the most business value. As you plan and design new liftoffs, remember to review the outcomes of your retrospectives and include what you discovered in your planning.

Following are two ways to help keep the team charter alive and the momentum established by the liftoff going throughout and beyond project completion.

Build on a Team Metaphor

A metaphor often emerges during a liftoff event—just as the rocket-launch metaphor did in this book. Team metaphors can provide powerful connections and a shorthand for the team and stakeholders.

For example, a service-delivery team worked with customers in a rapidly changing industry. It identified flexibility as a key quality it needed for customer interaction. During the liftoff, one developer said, “Things are changing so fast. We’ll need to be as flexible as Gumby to deliver what they’ll need six months from now.” (Gumby is the name of a poseable bendy figure toy, and cultural icon, familiar in North America. It’s made of rubber wrapped around a flexible wire frame and holds its position however the user changes it.)

Afterward, throughout the project, what would Gumby do? became code words for meeting customers’ changing needs. Gumby toys large and small appeared around the workspace.

During the liftoff, watch for metaphors to emerge. When they do, elaborate and build on them.

Apply Your Chartering Components

Purpose, alignment, and context fit many situations and applications beyond the charter and liftoff. You can use them as decision filters, course correctors, and discussion topics. When you recruit new team members, they provide a rich source of interview topics. They can help to clarify team dynamics throughout the work. Apply your purpose, alignment, and context to questions such as:

• Will doing X help us accomplish our purpose, or is it a distraction?

• Does this decision fit with our simple rules and create the culture we agreed we want?

• Has this working agreement become common practice? Do we need a different one?

• Why are we sending reports to Y? Did we identify Y as a stakeholder? If not, why not? Should we add Y to our context map or stop sending the reports?

• Is it time for a new prospective analysis? What do we know or think we know about what the next few months will bring? What happened that we didn’t anticipate in our last analysis? What does that tell us about what we don’t know that we don’t know? What could we seek to learn?