New Scrum Team – Basic Ground Rules

I love to take various workshops with my teams, especially when the team is new, it adds fun to it.

Workshops can be on anything, e.g. workshop for deriving ground rules (guidelines) for the team, improving delivery quality, resolving a problem/impediment, building trust, alignment, respect etc.

It gives me goosebumps to see the unique outputs from each workshops. Team too realizes the beauty of collective learning.

Here are some abstracts of bullets those were collected when I was assigned a new team few years back and I wanted to align them on certain “behavioral” and “professional” aspects.

I asked them to come up their understanding of – What is “Basic Ground Rules”? And if our team needs to have some guidelines defined on “behavioral” and “professional” front of the team.

When you go through bullets below, it might seem trivial points to few of you, but it lays down the basic foundation of “alignment” and once team is aligned to a “Purpose” people can do wonders!

Here is what I got from the team:

What are ground rules in our context (Scrum Team)?

"Ground rules are a list of behaviors and rules a team decide are useful for working together as a team in a productive and respectful way to increase overall team’s performance and efficiency."

Suggestions on ground rules/guidelines :

• Members must be available for daily scrum or other scheduled meetings on time.
• Individuals JIRA tasks/comments must be updated before coming to daily scrum.
• Leaves/vacations must be planned as much as possible, let’s try avoiding ad-hoc off-days.
• Vacation alert must be added to the email signature and should setup out-of-office note during their vacation. Weekly once, member should update about their upcoming vacations, if any.
• We must use common email signature structure to depict ourselves as “one” team.
• Once Sprint starts, no JIRA tickets should be in unassigned state.
• All the User stories must have story point estimations.
• During daily scrum, make sure that everyone gets heard (updates must be precise and clear so that everybody understands what you are doing)
• All the clarification related to user stories must be done using JIRA comments sections so as to keep a log of discussion (add all the stakeholders/team-mates as “watchers” so that all are notified whenever there is an update)
• Avoid informal/social talks during team meetings.
• Inform team if unable to complete work on time.
• Treat each other with respect.

Other suggestions for improving team’s performance

• Ownership must be evident
• When time calls, confront issues directly and promptly.
• Take initiative by offering ideas and volunteering for tasks
• Play an equal role in the team by contributing equally to every task.
• Ask for help from the team or other resources if “stuck” or falling behind.
•  Accept responsibility and accountability along with the authority given.

Simple and precise; created by the team, for the team !