Team Norms & Working Agreements

Agile teams are self-organized. Teams are empowered to figure out the specifics of how to work together, often referred to as "Team Norms" or "Team Working Agreements".

Contents

The contents can vary - as it is ultimately up to the team to define those critical commitments to each other. The depth can vary from a "one-pager" to a multi-page document ("page" being relative as they are typically housed in a wiki or other documentation repository). Content can include:

• Schedule of agile ceremonies
• Communication protocols and expectations
• Decision making and accountability
• On-call responsibilities & routing important production alerts
• Sizing methods
• Core working hours
• Availability expectations for chat, phone, etc.
• Work tracking workflow & mechanics (e.g. use of Jira labels, linking of tickets, etc.)
• Code review / pull request process
• Definition of ready/done for stories
• Cultural norms and tone setting

Program Norms vs. Team Norms

For programs with multiple teams, two tiers of documents make sense:

1. A program-level set of norms and expectations that should be common among all teams, but not over-specify things that can be up to the team level.
2. Team-level agreements to capture nuances for each team. This is a shorter document, as it is only extending the foundational program-level norms.

Successful Adoption & Use

Role Note: We use the title 'Agile Lead' to refer to the team member responsible for leading and coordinating the work of the team.

Establishing an effective agreement is not an exercise in simply creating a document. It is only useful if the team is bought into it and operates according to the agreement day-to-day. Successful engagement looks like:

1. Team Norms Workshop: The team holds a round-table to discuss the key points of the agreement. The goal is to gain input, create initial content, and set the team up for buy-in. This could take 1-2 hours depending on the size of the team.
2. Authoring: The Agile Lead takes time offline to refine the workshop notes into a draft; then shares the draft to the team.
3. Review and Commitment: Each team member takes the time to read the draft agreement. The Agile Lead hosts a meeting to discuss any major comments and adjustments. Then the team commits to following the agreement.
4. Ongoing Reference: The Agile Lead and other team members regularly reference and walk through the agreement in sprint retros; and an important onboarding step is to walk each new team member through the agreement.
5. Updates: As a result of findings from team retros, the team makes updates to the agreement. After some time (each year or so), a fresh team workshop may be warranted to revisit the agreement as a whole.

Example Artifacts

The artifact library has a starter document as well as examples of team norms & working agreements from past projects.