A team charter is the agreement a team makes with itself about how it will work together. It records the values the team says it holds, the working agreements it has made, how it communicates, how it decides and what it does when two members disagree. PMI lists it among the artefacts of the People domain, and a candidate is expected to know who writes it, what it contains and when it is used.
The team charter sits alongside the project charter and does a different job. The project charter authorises the project and names the project manager, and it is signed by a sponsor. The team charter governs conduct inside the team, and it is written by the team. The sections below describe what the document contains, why the team has to write it and the moment at which it becomes useful.
What the team charter contains
Shared values come first. These are the handful of things the team says it cares about, written specifically enough to be broken. Respect fails that test, because nobody argues for the opposite. "We would rather raise a risk early and be wrong than raise it late and be right" passes, because it tells a person what to do on a Tuesday.
Working agreements are the concrete part. When work is ready to start and when it is finished, how documents and code get reviewed, what happens when somebody is going to miss a commitment and how much of a day is protected from meetings all belong here.
Communication norms cover which channel carries what, how quickly a message is expected to be answered and what has to be written down. Decision rules say who decides what and what happens when the team cannot agree, which is the clause everybody skips writing and everybody eventually needs.
Meeting expectations set attendance, preparation, punctuality and who runs each recurring session. The conflict process describes how disagreement is handled before it reaches a manager, and this is the hardest part to write because it has to be agreed by people who currently get on.
The situation each clause is written for
Read on its own, that list is a set of pleasant intentions. Every clause in it exists for a specific bad afternoon, and the way to test a draft is to name the afternoon.
| What the charter covers | The afternoon it is written for |
|---|---|
| Shared values | Somebody has to choose between raising a risk early and looking foolish, and the team already made that choice on their behalf |
| Working agreements | A commitment is about to slip, and who hears about it and how soon was settled weeks ago |
| Communication norms | Something urgent goes to the channel nobody reads at the weekend, and the norm says which channel carries urgency |
| Decision rules | The team has split three against two on a design and the argument has been running for a week |
| Meeting expectations | Two people arrive unprepared to a review six people cleared their calendars for, and it is the third time |
| The conflict process | Two people have stopped speaking to each other and both are waiting for a manager to notice |
The right hand column is the one to read first when drafting. A clause with no plausible afternoon behind it is decoration, and a bad afternoon with no clause behind it is the gap worth filling before the project meets it.
Why the team writes the charter
Those afternoons are easier to name for the people who will live through them, and this is one reason the team writes the document. The larger reason is that a charter written by the team is a commitment its authors made in front of each other, which is a different thing from a document handed down. A charter issued to a team is a policy, and a policy is complied with and never owned.
The project manager facilitates. This means running a session where the questions get asked, disagreement is allowed to surface and the wording is argued over until it means something. A session that reaches unanimous agreement in twenty minutes has produced nothing, because all it captured was what everybody already assumed.
The prompts that produce real disagreement are concrete ones. What counts as finished, how long a review may sit, what a person does when they disagree with a decision that has already been made and how the team wants to hear that a date is at risk each have several defensible answers, and the argument between those answers is the session doing its work.
The quiet members are included deliberately. The person who says least during charter writing is often the one whose expectations differ most from the rest of the room, and those are exactly the expectations the exercise exists to bring out.
How the charter is used in the first disagreement
Once written, the charter does nothing visible for a while. Everybody agrees, the document goes somewhere sensible and for six weeks nobody looks at it.
The moment it pays back is the first real friction. Somebody has missed two commitments without saying anything, or a decision keeps being reopened, or reviews are stalling because one reviewer is overloaded. In a team with no charter that conversation is a confrontation between two people and quickly becomes about character. In a team with a charter it is a comparison against something both people helped write, and the subject is the agreement.
This is also why a vague charter is worse than none, since a promise to communicate openly can be compared against nothing at all.
| A clause that cannot be checked | The same clause written so it can be |
|---|---|
| Communicate openly | Say within a day when a commitment is at risk, in the team channel |
| Respect each other | Disagree in the meeting, and never in the corridor afterwards |
| Be responsive | Answer a direct question within a working day, or say when the answer will come |
| Come to meetings prepared | Read the document before the review, or say at the start that it has not been read |
| Resolve conflict constructively | Raise it with the person first, and bring it to the team if two attempts fail |
Everything in the right hand column either happened or it did not, which is what makes the charter usable in the conversation it was written for.
When the charter is revisited
A charter is an agreement between particular people, so it lasts only as long as the group that made it. Every arrival changes that group, and a new member who inherits a charter written by strangers has received a policy after all.
New members are brought through the charter by being asked what they would change, and sending them the document does not count. Some of what they suggest will be better, and the parts they cannot follow are usually the parts written in language that made sense only to the people in the original room.
The charter is also revisited when the work changes. A team that moves from predictive delivery to iterative delivery, absorbs a supplier or spreads across several time zones is working under conditions its agreements were written before. A review held after a difficult month is worth more than one held on a calendar date, because there is something concrete to test the wording against.
The charter written to be seen
The commonest failure is a charter written for an audience outside the team. It contains the values the team believes an auditor wants, it is duly signed and nobody refers to it again, so the first real argument goes exactly as it would have gone without it. A charter that has never been cited during a disagreement is a charter out of use, and that is a fact that can be checked.