Working Agreement - Agile Software Development

hi my name is Chris G and I'm an agile coach today I'll talk about the working agreement the working agreement is a documented set of ground rules that the team creates and follows in order to improve their productivity and happiness think of some of the things that slow your team down for example some teams find that their meetings are more productive when everyone puts away their phones and laptops unless they need them for the meeting other teams find that having individuals come to late to their standup limits their usefulness the best way to create a working agreement is to use a little bit of reverse psychology get together as a team and brainstorm all the ways your team can fail then prioritize the five most significant risks to your team based on their likelihood of occurring and the severity of their impact then come up with a specific rule that would prevent that from happening so for instance perhaps the team agrees that having people working in their laptops during meeting is a big risk to the productivity they then create a rule that says the only person who should have their laptop open is the person presenting their screen to the rest of the team all their Electronics should be put away if there's a production issue the person working on the issue should leave the room so it's not to distract everyone else see if you can come up with about five to seven rules to help with the top five risks you've identified then post this in a conspicuous location if you're collocated write each rule in a sticky note and and past it on a wall near your desks if you're distributed create a page in your Wei or similar space the whole team is responsible for holding each other accountable to following the working agreement be polite and ask each other to follow the rules that you agree to escalate only as the last resort review your working agreement regularly at least once every Sprint at the retrospective the team can add or remove items to the working agreement at any time so long there's General consensus if your team creates and uses a working agreement diligently you will soon find that your team is happier and more productive best of luck