Scrum Team Working Agreements

Save often and keep in mind that agreements can always be renegotiated, especially when new members join or situations change. Each new team has a strong dynamic, with individuals preferring a certain mix of behaviors and practices. Respect your uniqueness! The next morning, I arrived early, zealously, to finally meet everyone on the team. I had decided to stay in learning mode and understand. I refused the SM`s invitation to support the team after the fact, and I let it proceed in retrospect, as had always been done. At 8:00 a.m., SM, PO and I gathered in an empty meeting room in our Home Office and the SM connected the Skype link that launched the meeting. The two local engineers were at a distance and chose each other. The Indian team was seated with their supervisor in a unique meeting room in Mumbai. Although we were a screen share, no one else could see anyone else because no one had turned on video cameras. In the next iteration, I thought deeply and hard about how, in the previous retrospective, I could have changed the game to improve confidence. I remembered the five dysfunctions of a Patrick Lencioni team and how this team presented almost all the dysfunctions, from lack of confidence and fear of conflict to inattention to results and lack of commitment. Lencioni says: “The confidence is to know that if a team member pushes you, they do it because they take care of the team.” I needed everyone on the team to feel that they could trust each other and hold each other to account so that their contributions would be important.

What I should have done was acknowledge their hard work and create a psychologically safe environment before sharing my observations. So I thought I`d try an experiment to improve the safety of the team and overcome the barriers. I told the team that they should be willing to share something personal with the whole group in our next retrospective. Everyone had two minutes to share family stories, images, recipes, songs, basically everything, as long as it had nothing to do with work! First, set the context for working agreements with your team. As a group, you can use whiteboards (physical or digital), adhesion notes, worksheets or flipcharts. Table 3. Before and after comparing roles, dynamics and team activities Would you like to share your team`s remote team agreement to help other teams develop their teams? Fast forward to March 2020 and the global context has changed dramatically.