Recently an email came in asking about writing team charters. I’ve worked at a number of companies that asked teams to write charters, and I think it’s an interesting project. That said, it’s not a project I’d generally prioritize. (View Highlight)
If you pushed me on this topic, I’d probably suggest you write an engineering strategy document from the perspective of your team. A few thoughts on what team charters try to solve, and then why I think they’re generally not very useful. (View Highlight)
What team charters try to solve:
• Building team alignment around their mission
• Building team alignment around their approach to accomplishing that mission
• Helping folks on other teams to understand your team’s mission (View Highlight)
Teams want to involve their members in writing their team charters, turning them into a bottoms up initiative (View Highlight)
• eam members generally write charters based on solving the bottoms-up initiative they’ve identified, rather than accurately reflecting their organization and leadership’s view of what the team needs to do. Said differently, teams often select the mission they want rather than the mission they have (View Highlight)
, teams doing a lot of maintenance work will often omit that work from their charter, even though their leadership and organization expect them to do it. Then team members might say that leadership isn’t respecting their charter, and get upset (View Highlight)
