How to Facilitate Agile Chartering for Alignment

By this time in your agile chartering journey, you’ve rough drafted the purpose and reviewed it with your team to begin agile chartering. Now you that have a first draft purpose, alignment comes next.

You’ll develop the first draft of alignment from scratch together with the team. There’s no rough draft this time. You’ll lead the team through defining simple rules, establishing the core team, and creating working agreements.

Conducting the Team Chartering Workshop for Alignment

Following is a sample agenda for a one-day team chartering work session focusing on alignment (step 4).

Sample Agenda (Alignment)

1. Welcome and introductions

2. Review the agenda

3. Review and revise the draft purpose

4. Facilitate alignment

   • Define simple rules

   • Form the core team

   • Create the core team working agreements

   • Compare the alignment with the Goodness Checklist for Alignment

5. Facilitate context

6. Clarify the next steps and wrap up

Activity 1: Define Simple Rules

Start the alignment work with defining simple rules to guide the team. Offer a handful of examples of simple rules from other teams or groups as listed in Appendix 1, ​Sample Charters​.

For five to ten minutes, brainstorm a list of potential team values that have meaning to people in the group for this product. (You can choose to brainstorm out loud with one person writing on a flip chart or whiteboard, calling out values round-robin style, or by giving people a few minutes to write the values on sticky notes first. Select the style that best fits your group.) Remind everyone to state values in one to three words. Encourage group members to go beyond their first thoughts and also bring to mind less obvious values.

Clarify each value someone mentions (for example, how is telling the truth different from honesty?) and eliminate redundancies. Use your prioritizing process to reduce the list to the four to six values the group believes will have the greatest impact on its work. Remind the group that the list should represent the values of the whole team as well as stay in alignment with what the organization finds worthy.

Generate simple rules from the values. It’s not necessary to establish a one-to-one match between the values and simple rules. A given simple rule can refer to more one value, and a value can contribute a foundation for more than one simple rule. Show the group examples of simple rules from other projects as listed in Appendix 1, ​Sample Charters​.

Look for opportunities to combine ideas from various team members to create a set of no more than five simple rules that everyone owns. Check for usefulness by asking, How will this simple rule help to guide our decision making? For example, values such as high-quality work, meeting customer needs, or trust could lead to a simple rule such as: customer value always comes first. Values such as honesty or simplicity could lead to a simple rule such as give effective, honest feedback.

Use your decision-making process to determine highest-priority simple rules.

Activity 2: Establish the Core Team

To help the core team members gel as a team, provide the team with a printout of these questions:

• Who am I? What skills, knowledge, permissions, and personal qualities will I contribute to the work?

• Why do I believe that this group is well suited to the work of the project?

• Where are our gaps? What additional skills, knowledge, permissions, and personal qualities do we need to be effective?

• What’s the most important thing that others need to know about working with me effectively?

• What’s in it for me (WIIFM)? What do I want to accomplish for myself—my project within the project?

Answer the questions round-robin fashion with one round per question. Give team members the option to pass, and come back to them before starting the next round. As an alternative, provide the questions and ask participants to create a personal poster with the answers.

Next, draw three columns on a flip chart or whiteboard. Label the first two columns Same and Different. Using the answers to the previous questions, ask team members to brainstorm answers to two new questions:

• In what ways are we the same?

• In what ways are we different?

Remember, go for quantity, not quality, and a bias toward including, rather than excluding, ideas. Include even simple or obvious differences (eye color, pets, neighborhoods, place of birth, number of children). Then go on to elicit more subtle differences (hobbies and interests, technical language proficiencies, work preferences, educational background). Get a long list.

Label the third column on the flip chart DTMD (differences that make a difference) and discuss, Which of our differences will make the most difference on this project? Which ones really matter? Write the top five to ten significant differences in the third column and prioritize them.

After everyone has answered all the questions and discussed similarities and differences, hold a short discussion about the implications for them as a working team. Remember that differences are one of the conditions for self-organizing, complex adaptive systems as discussed in ​Setting Conditions for Optimal Team Learning​.

For another activity to help individuals get started as a team, see Jonathan Rasmussen’s The Agile Samurai [Ras10] and his “The Drucker Exercise” post at his Agile Warrior blog.^[9]

Activity 3: Create Working Agreements

In this activity, your team will establish a short list of operational guidelines and will develop two types of agreements: descriptions of team aspirations for teamwork and professional standards; and agreements on new definitions, such as the definition of done for the project. The list shouldn’t include routine behaviors that don’t need reinforcement. Revise working agreements over time as your team’s needs and habits change.

Begin by inviting a list of areas of agreement that will help your team. Experiences with previous teams are great sources of frustration and sometimes amusement. Expect to hear wry laughter at this point.

If your intact team is continuing, ask for existing working agreements to start the list. If team members haven’t worked together before, ask them about areas of concern from previous teams. Ask about behaviors or standards they want to use to guide their new team. Add everything to the list. Ask them to complete the sentence, We work together best when.... If your team is new to working agreements, show samples from other projects as listed in Appendix 1, ​Sample Charters​.

Explain that both explicit and implicit agreements influence how people work together. Draw out implicit agreements from experiences on previous teams and continue to add to the list. Avoid prematurely editing and refining each agreement topic. You’ll do that work after prioritizing the list. Refining an agreement you won’t use is a wasted (and time-consuming) effort.

When you have a list of ten to twenty potential areas for agreement, prioritize the list and pare it down to the top five or fewer that will offer the greatest benefit for your team for now.

Write every working agreement from a positive, action-oriented point of view. It’s not don’t require team members to show up at the same time. It’s team members can start work any time between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. or our core work hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.; and we all show up for at least seven hours every day (barring illness or other reasonable absence).

Set a recurring schedule for reviewing, and possibly revising, your team working agreements. As some working agreements become second nature to your team, they can drop away and be replaced with agreements more relevant to the current situation. As the team applies your agreements, members will discover ways they would like to revise and improve them for use.

Activity 4: Compare Alignment with the Goodness Checklist

Before committing to your simple rules, working agreements, and other core team artifacts, take a few minutes to compare your work so far to the questions in the Goodness Checklist for Alignment:

• Are your simple rules short, simple (but not simplistic), and easy to remember? Do they reflect your team’s ideals about working together?

• Are your simple rules stated in the positive (no don’ts), scalable and generalizable to many decision-making situations, and few in number (five, plus or minus two)?

• Do you have at least one simple rule that applies to group identity, at least one for diversity, and at least one for how team members interact?

• Does the core team exhibit the conditions for high performance to emerge (adapted from The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization [KS99])? Does it have a shared purpose, cross-functional skills for interdependent work, joint accountability, a shared approach to work (agile), a small team size, and a mutual history? Attending a liftoff and team chartering will begin to create a shared history for a new team.

• Do your team’s working agreements finish the sentence, We work together best when....? Do they help the team members in their aspirations for best working conditions?

• Are your working agreements few (five, plus or minus two) and focused on daily operations? Are they positive, action-oriented, and stated in the present tense?

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 alignment will serve the team well enough to get started on (or continue) their work.