Every few sprints, the work agreement should be updated, often by revising it retrospectively and asking a question like, „Is this still our working modalities? What do we want to update? In what areas do new agreements need? Here is what the PO observed in his own words: „Before the coaching session, our team experienced challenges and dysfunctions. There was no team unit because we were a distributed team of people living in Texas and India. Since we had never met before and our tools (Skype, X) didn`t work, we never met face-to-face, even virtually. It is important to be sensitive to geographical cultural differences, in this case, the highest person in the offshore hierarchy has spoken on behalf of all offshore members, as they are usually trained in American cultural norms and are motivated as an external consultant to appease their American clients. Table 2. Questions the team answered to reach a working agreement Instead, to be a proactive and self-organized team, you should talk about these issues and use the agreement as an action plan to overcome them. If your team has been working together for some time, you`ve identified some of the main issues or concerns that need to be addressed in your agreement. These agreements have spared me a lot of grief, so I`ve given some tips below on how to create one that works for your agile team. I`ve also included three examples of clauses I`ve used for my teams that you could use. The following are recommended for a remote team agreement moderator.
This is not a prescriptive program. I had never been a big fan of work arrangements. Of course, I knew what they were, I knew what they had to do, I had even integrated a version or two into some of the Agile courses I had taught, but I never understood how powerful the process of developing these can be! Scrum Guide „The Five Scrum Values“ www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#values The agreement a team creates is unique to them. At least that is what we hope. A Scrum Master I worked with said, „Here`s an agreement between the other teams. Remember that if we just use that? I was a little crippled, to say the least. Since I wanted SM to make the process easier, I coached them to create a list of questions for each value to generate a discussion and help the teams decide on any „rules“ we should create to make sure everyone adheres to that value. We didn`t care where the answers were placed as long as they were captured. The SM asked the questions and collected the answers while the team voted on the points to be formalized in a working agreement. This allowed the SM to summarize what was most appreciated by the collective team (see Table 2).
The most important factor in developing a teamwork agreement is to identify the challenges your team faces. Face the unique challenges of collaboration for your team, and then focus on solving them specifically. Work arrangements are a simple and powerful way to create explicit guidelines for the type of work culture you want for your team. They remind everyone how to engage in respectful behavior and communication. In this article, we`ll help you understand why these agreements are useful and how you can help your team create their own agreements. Given the friction between some team members so far, he opts for a 1-2-4 model[3] to discuss possible agreements. This template is designed to ensure that everyone has a voice in the process: a work agreement is a short set of guidelines created by the team for the team that determine the team`s expectations of each other. .
