Does your team have Working Agreements? (WA’s)
Effective teams think about how they will accomplish their work together before they begin working. They describe the levels of performance and professionalism they want to achieve, then record them in Working Agreements.
WA’s cover such areas as:
What does “done” mean for us?
What will meetings look like for us? (e.g., type, number, frequency, duration, attendance expectations, decision-making, etc.)
What Agile engineering and project management practices and methods will we incorporate?
What interactions, teamwork and collaboration will best support our work? (e.g., communication flows, conflict, feedback, continuous learning, social time, fun!)
Effective teams regularly take stock to review and revise their WA’s, in retrospectives or planning meetings. They ask questions such as: What Working Agreements have helped our team the most? Which ones have become second nature? Which did we think we needed, only to discover they weren’t enough of a stretch?