How Team Charters can improve the Productivity and Agility of a Product Team

Introduction

Like in many other industries, a team is behind the development of a product. There are several different ways these teams work to achieve their goals. When you consider the case of football (soccer), various teams use different tactics/styles to achieve their goals. It is the responsibility of the coaches of those teams to ensure that all players within that team abide by those tactics/rules of engagement. When a player fails to abide by those rules, there are consequences like dismissal from the team. That is where a team charter (constitution) comes into play to ensure that each team member follows a set of rules which will ensure that the team wins. Without adherence to these rules, it is usually hard for that team to realize any success, regardless of the presence of skilled players. To relate to the English Premier League, some teams have very talented players but they have taken very many years without having any trophy to show for their talent.

This article will dive deeper into the importance of establishing team rules while sharing some real-life examples of how the productivity and agility of a team can be negatively affected if any of the members fail to abide by the rules.

I hope you enjoy it! :)

What is a team?

A team is a group of people who share a common goal.

There is a clear difference between a team and a group of people. When people operate in silos but within the same “team”, they are just a group of people masquerading as a team without a common goal.

Groups of people who are just together in meetings because:

They belong to the same organization or
Simply because they are part of the same profession
Or because they have been told to be together but do not share a common goal.
They could even be of the same gender — where that is the only thing that unites them.
Sometimes, they could also just be people who like the same football (soccer) club.
They could also belong to the same charity organization.
The group could also belong to the same family as biological siblings.

A team does not just share similar interests but rather they should have a similar goal and should also strive to have the same mindset as they go about their work. For one to qualify as a team, they need to subscribe to some rules of engagement.

What is productivity?

Productivity is the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the output rate per unit of input.

One keyword out of this is output (quantity of work). So if a team produces a significant amount of output, they are considered productive.

So what are some of the things that can destroy productivity?

Context switching: working on something important & having to set it aside to work on something else
Bad code: meaningless names, long methods, deeply nested ifs, etc.
Writing more code than is needed to solve the problem at hand. It’s pure waste.
The quality of the work tools could also harm productivity. Tools could also be a “workspace” on that note.

What is Agility?

Agility is the ability to move quickly and easily. It is where a team can be quick, resourceful, and adaptable.

Now, this is extremely important and it is at the core of our framework (Scrum) that we use to go about our day-to-day work. Whenever service desk tickets come into the picture, we must address them promptly. At the moment, we do have a huge list of service desk tickets whose status is not yet clear which means that we are not able to move quickly and easily on them.

What are some of the things which can negatively impact a team’s agility?

Lack of a clear process of getting things done.
A lack of a dedicated team.
Lack of shared understanding of the context
Members of the team who do not feel like leaders but just followers
A lot of work in progress which prevents team members from focusing.
Lack of a growth mindset from team members. The inability to put aside time to experiment, learn and improve.

What is a team charter?

The goal of a team charter, or work charter, is to define and document your team’s overall objectives, resources, and constraints. It can be a helpful tool when establishing a new team, but it can also be leveraged to re-launch or reinvigorate an existing team that’s been operating for a while.

How does a team charter improve productivity and agility?

Because of the minimal planning required in Agile, a team needs to have some clear guidelines on how to operate. And that team needs to fully understand these guidelines.

Most times, especially in cross-functional teams, it is hard to get complete alignment during the process of product development. This is because of the different backgrounds and training received by the different team members. An example is a team made up of designers, marketers, software engineers, and hardware engineers. All of these view the product development process from different perspectives;

A software engineering expert who is practicing Scrum will consider the process to be iterative where whatever is released is never the final product but always subject to change. So a software engineer might struggle to appreciate working alongside someone who has not integrated well with a team’s processes and members yet they are part of the team.
A marketing expert who is also practicing Scrum will consider whatever is released to be final so they will struggle to understand the entire iterative process of development. They might also struggle to feel a part of the team since they will only be focusing on the final product and not the collaboration details that assist in the realization of a high-quality product.
A hardware/network engineering expert might struggle to appreciate the importance of collaboration tools and processes due to the nature of their work.

With all these examples (non-exhaustive) of the different mindsets within the same team, we can only address them by agreeing to the mode of operation for the team. That is how the team charter comes into play and it needs to be done at the earliest possible time during the development process.

The process of creating a team charter should be collaborative where the team members review the main aspects of how they will work together. Some of the aspects considered in include:

The team’s purpose

What kind of team is this exactly? (A work team, project team, management team, coordination team?)
Why does the team exist? What is the team responsible for accomplishing?

The context

Who is the team accountable to?
With what other groups/teams do we connect? What do they want/need from us?

The team’s goals

What specific results do we expect from our team’s efforts?

The team roles

What will each team member do on the team?
Will the roles be rotational?

The teamwork processes

Meetings and their regularity
Who creates and manages the agenda of the meetings

Decision making

What level of decision-making responsibility do we have?
What decision process will we use?

Team norms

What do we expect of each other?
How do we agree to handle conflict?

Key Takeaways

A team needs to set up a team charter at the very beginning of their collaboration and they need to ensure that all the members of that team appreciate its details and sign against it to confirm their adherence to it.
You must form a cross-team which is made of members of different skill sets to properly practice Scrum. It is close to impossible to solve any real-world problem using one functional (departmental) team.
A team charter improves productivity by agreeing to a specific workflow that caters to various scenarios — it helps the team focus more on producing work rather than finding ways of dealing with preventable issues.
A team charter improves agility by setting in place a clear process of getting things done. When a team lacks a charter that defines a clear process, they usually get stuck on relatively straightforward tasks which eventually prevents them from responding or acting fast enough to address any emerging requests from respective stakeholders.

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