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Questions for new teams

teamBuilding newTeams

Purpose – “Why are we here?”:

  1. The team has a shared understanding of its vision.
  2. All team members understand the key business outcomes desired to realize the team’s vision, and the indicators they will look to in order to determine whether they are succeeding at realizing those outcomes.
  3. Team members know who their customers and partners/stakeholders are
  4. The team has an initial backlog of valuable work items that will help the team realize the business outcomes
  5. Team members have a sense of how the business value of work items is defined and where tradeoffs might be considered in meeting customer expectations.

Alignment – “Who are we and how will we work together?”:

  1. Team members know who is a core member of the team, and who are external contributors who they need to work with to help them deliver.
  2. The team has articulated its shared values
  3. Team members have identified simple guiding principles to help them be successful together
  4. The team has a working agreement outlining specific behaviours they want to support each other in so that they can work effectively together.
  5. The team has identified the capabilities it possesses and the capabilities it needs to develop in order to deliver reliably and with quality, and to minimize bottlenecks/single-points-of-failure.

Context – “What’s the bigger picture? How do we understand the system and its influences?”:

  1. The team knows who its stakeholders/partners are, and what information/decisions/resources they need from each other.
  2. The team understands what decisions about the work have already been made and other constraints that will determine what/how they deliver
  3. The team has considered the risks and opportunities inherent in their upcoming work, and is actively considering how to mitigate risks and take advantage of opportunities for greater benefit.
  4. The team knows what resources are needed to deliver, and is working to get the resources it doesn’t currently have in a timely fashion.
  5. The team has established the initial practices it will use for coordinating, collaborating and communicating its progress.