Understanding Alignment

Effective team alignment develops a coherent core team. Alignment, the second of the three critical elements of your team’s charter, also includes three parts. Shared simple rules guide individual team members’ decisions to align with the whole. Exploring core team membership helps the group form an approach to the work. Working agreements get the core team started on the project. In these ways, alignment helps the team create an alliance to achieve its mission.

Simple Rules

In agile chartering, values represent your team’s beliefs and ideals about what matters in regard to the work at hand. Each team member joined the team holding his or her own beliefs about the way the team should do the work. Every new member brings new beliefs. A whole team’s values represent a synthesis of all of the team members’ definitions of authenticity and integrity. Its values determine the way the team approaches its work. A shared explicit understanding of the team’s values clarifies what’s most important and deepens the team’s connection to the purpose.

Single-word values (such as honesty) can be too abstract or open to interpretation. Simple rules provide concrete descriptions of how behavior shows commitment to values. Simple rules inform each team member’s choices and actions, as well as those of the whole team. They guide individual and group decision-making. They create alignment among the company, the team, and individual values. Simple rules create and sustain your team culture.

Your simple rules represent what matters most to your core team. Simple rules reflect the shared ethical and moral boundaries that affect the team’s work. When team members discuss simple rules, they expose different perspectives about what’s important. In these conversations, the team defines the work environment you’ll create. When team members must make difficult decisions, they’ll use the simple rules as guides.

As described in ​Setting Conditions for Optimal Team Learning​, all complex adaptive systems—even human systems—abide by a short set of simple rules, whether the team makes them explicit or not. Left unexamined, individual simple rules can morph to form implicit team simple rules, often driven by the team member with the most powerful influence. Implicit, unexamined simple rules may not be in your team’s best interest. In agile chartering, every team takes the time to make explicit simple rules to support effective work. (For more about simple rules, see Influencing Patterns for Change: A Human Systems Dynamics Primer for Leaders [HQ08].)

For example, the Artform team (not its real name) chose a value of quality as the foundation of one of its simple rules. Every team member wanted two things from the rest of the organization: recognition for delivering the product with no defects, and recognition for consistently delivering the product with no defects. Team members felt proud that they spent most of their time building new functionality rather than bug-fixing. Like other teams, they felt pressure from the rest of the organization. Product managers wanted them to get things done fast. Yet, they knew that sacrificing their standards of quality would increase defects and technical debt. It would reduce predictable delivery and ultimately slow their work down. As a reminder, they adopted the simple rule: quality trumps expediency. They brought up this simple rule in every work-planning session.

Use the following questions to help teams identify simple rules that will work well for them:

• What do we do that serves us well for building team coherence?

• What do we do to create a postive work environment for our team?

• If Martians landed in our workspace, what would they notice about our behavior toward one another and others outside the team?

• What would the IT admin (or anyone who interacts regularly with the team but isn’t part of the team) say our rules are?

• How do we want to operate with one another around here that we don’t already do?

• How do we want to treat our coworkers, our community, our customers, our vendors?

Then recommend guidelines for writing simple rules, including:

• Establish rules that describe the simplest things we could do to keep, or create, the team culture we want.

• Make rules generalizable and scalable.

• Keep the list short (five, plus or minus two).

• Start each rule with an action verb.

• State each rule in the positive.

• Ensure that we craft a rule for each of: the team’s identity as a group (containers), our diversities and the differences among us (differences), and how team members interact with one another (exchanges).

You can use the newly defined simple rules right away. They serve as a filter as your group iterates through the rest of the chartering work. As you continue, ask, Does this part of the charter align with our simple rules? Will it help us to demonstrate the behavior we want? As the team works on other portions of the charter, new simple rules might emerge. Early simple rules might undergo revision or replacement.

It’s also important to consider the alignment between your organizational simple rules and your team’s. If team and corporate simple rules conflict, it’s an indicator of trouble ahead. For example, you might have a highly innovative team (try new things, experiment to innovate) that operates within an IT department that’s risk averse (choose no tool without a rule).

Here are examples of values with associated simple rules developed and used by real teams:

• Openness: Speak up on topics that concern you or the team.

• Courage: Communicate openly and keep everything on the table.

• Outcome-focus: Evaluate work products, not the author.

• Feedback: Seek effective feedback on work products and working relationships.

• Innovation: Try new ideas, experiment to innovate.

• Trust: Assume positive intent and seek clarity.

Everyone benefits when you include all relevant perspectives in the discussion. Encourage key stakeholders to attend this part of chartering.

Core Team

Core team members align with the purpose as a team to effectively and efficiently begin their work. Chartering acts as an initial team-building activity. Each team member gets to know the strengths, capabilities, and commitments of the others. They discuss what each member wants to contribute and wants to gain from working on the purpose.

In agile teamwork practices, a whole team includes a cross-functional mix of people. Team members represent every skill set they need to deliver an increment of a working product. Teams might include members who have skills in writing, designing, and testing software. They might have expertise in representing the customers’ needs and points of view. The core team owns responsibility for building the deliverable and meeting the mission tests. The core team gives undivided attention to the work and achieves its mission. Depending on the company, core teams might have people who have a role in supporting the ongoing work (for example, Scrum masters, coaches, business analysts, project managers).

According to James Shore and Shane Warden in their book, The Art of Agile Development [SW07]:

Team software development is different. The same information is spread out among many members of the team. Different people know:

• How to design and program the software (programmers, designers, and architects)

• Why the software is important (product manager)

• The rules the software should follow (domain experts)

• How the software should behave (interaction designers)

• How the user interface should look (graphic designers)

• Where defects are likely to hide (testers)

• How to interact with the rest of the company (project manager)

• Where to improve work habits (coach)

All of this knowledge is necessary for success. [Extreme Programming] acknowledges this reality by creating cross-functional teams composed of diverse people who can fulfill all of the team’s roles.

You selected and assigned core team members for their professional and teamwork skills. Their diverse knowledge and perspectives enrich the chartering discussion. They contribute different views of experience in the domain, the agile approach, or the organization. Technical team members might bring information about new technologies and techniques.

As the people tasked with achieving the mission, it’s critical that the core team buys into the purpose. If core team members don’t feel inspired and energized, the work won’t go as well. One energized individual (or even two) can’t carry the project. It takes a united effort with a common understanding and commitment to the purpose. When asked, every team member needs to provide a consistent description of the deliverable. Each person needs to understand and commit to the team’s common purpose.

Working Agreements

As part of alignment, it’s important that your team develops working agreements to identify a set of operational guidelines to help it achieve the project mission. Through the act of defining working agreements, your team members forge a pact about how they’ll interact and produce.

Working agreements form a powerful social contract. This set of statements enables your team to clarify mutual expectations, and it reinforces team members’ commitment and joint accountability to a common outcome. Different organizations have differing ways of referring to these teamwork guidelines. You may hear them referred to simply as guidelines, or as operating agreements, team ground rules, group norms, or something else.

Phrase working agreements as ways to complete the sentence, We work together best when.... A set of five (plus or minus two) critical working agreements is a good number. These agreements will define how we want to do things around here on a daily basis. You get the best follow-through when every team member has input into the agreements. They need an understanding of what they can expect from one another and what is expected from them.

Working agreements have a standard-setting or aspirational quality. They’re the ways you wish you could act all the time but that haven’t yet become part of the team routine. You don’t need to spend time creating working agreements for practices you regularly exhibit.

Working agreements can address a variety of daily concerns, such as practices that need special attention, how communication happens, or how the team makes decisions. Many teams have working agreements about how to deal with conflicts, handle design decisions and coding standards, and definitions of done for iteration, story, and tasks. Team concerns about meetings—such as times, frequency, attendance, agendas, and how to handle distractions and interruptions—may need working agreements. Other topics of agreements can include how facilitation and other team maintenance roles are handled and how the team will share new development and production support tasks.

When your team members think through how they’ll approach their work, they get a jump start on doing the work. Agile teams that explicitly create working agreements early reach higher levels of productivity. They perform better than those that leave things to chance. This remains true for both colocated and distributed teams. Establish a clear understanding of expected behaviors to gain more-effective teamwork.

Working agreements bolster team effectiveness for many reasons:

• An explicit set of agreements about how a team functions provides clarity that prevents confusion and conflict later.

• Teams function together in many ways, and every team does it somewhat differently. You can only assume that everyone shares the same understandings if you’ve discussed and documented them.

• Working agreements help new team members learn how to participate constructively. They serve as the basic list of key dos and don’ts.

• In meetings, explicit working agreements help team members stay accountable, because if they violate an agreement, any other team member can point out that they agreed to it.

• When recruiting new team members, you can use the working agreements for behavioral interviewing questions. For example, Our team values timely and clear feedback. Tell us about a time when you received difficult feedback and how you responded.

Following are examples of teamwork-related working agreements from a variety of teams:

Moving forward

Any member may ask for a test for agreement at any time. The requesting member states the question for the team. Others may clarify. Each person then indicates his or her level of agreement. A call for test for agreement preempts other team action.

Wise use of meeting time

We stick to one conversation at a time in meetings.

Decisions

We will make team decisions according to type. We will decide how to decide first. In some cases we will abide by decisions made by the most qualified member of the team. In other cases, we will vote. In rare cases, when everyone’s support for the decision is critical, we will decide through consensus.

Feedback

We seek and offer feedback on the impact of our actions, inactions, and interactions.

Time

When team meetings are set, we make every effort to attend, be on time, come prepared to discuss the issues, and help the team stay on task. If extraordinary conditions cause us to have to miss a meeting, we inform the coach or other team members as soon as possible.

Learning

We fail fast, fail often, and identify our mistakes early.

Follow-through

We keep our agreements or, if we can’t, we advise teammates of problems as soon as possible.

Collective ownership

We ask for help when we are stuck on a task for more than one hour. We work in pairs for at least four hours a day. We rotate pairs at least every thirty minutes. The person who has been working on the task longest swaps out.

Knowledge transfer

We pair with any other team member only once per day.

Continuous improvement

We hold regular retrospectives and look for additional opportunities to reflect on our work, identify potential improvements, and take action wherever possible.

Estimating

We use planning poker to speed up estimating for story points and task hours.

Working Agreements or Simple Rules?

What’s the difference between working agreements and simple rules? Simple rules have their roots in values. They guide the toughest decisions for everyone involved in the project. Working agreements guide the daily work of the core team and focus on operations. The distinction between working agreements and simple rules matters less than actually having guidelines for your work that the team has developed and commits to using every day.