Team Agreement

Like all dynamic systems, teams have life-cycles. It is important to consider the strategies and tools leaders use to support effective functioning at a team's various stages. When launching a team, we often spend time planning what to do and forget to establish how we want to work together to support our collective objectives.

Collaborative planning is a framework designed to initiate a conversation that helps transition a team from individual orientations to that of a collective. It helps develop a shared understanding and accountability for how you want to work together to best leverage your individual preferences, strengths, and goals towards an innovative joint outcome. Your collaborative plan is a dynamic repository of your shared agreements that you can refer to and update as you learn more about each other and the project.

Note this repository is public. If there is information you prefer not to write here, you can write it on Slack instead. In particular, don't put phone numbers in this document!

Team Name

SegFault

Collaborative Climate

A collaborative climate engenders balanced communication within the team, thorough exploration and discussion of ideas, active reflection on team dynamics, proactive management of interpersonal conflict, and a safe environment for taking risks.

Discuss a previous team experience you've had in which the team cultivated a strong collaborative climate. What behaviors contributed to creating this type of team climate? What behaviors are important to your capstone team for building a collaborative climate?

Openness to ideas and safe environment for taking risks and making mistakes. Helping each other is extremely important. Communication is key! Not being afraid to communicate early on.

Individual strengths

Discuss your prior experiences as relevant to the CS capstone in general and your project in particular. Capture your understandings here:

• Kirk: good at writing scripts and makefiles to automate tasks; architecture (C++); documentation
• Nelson: open to suggestions/good to work with; a little web programming experience
• Jack: fits manager role; good with python; C#
• Melissa: pick things up quickly; good at algorithms; python, C++; documentation

Individual goals

What do you each hope to learn or gain from the CS capstone? What would make you proud of your individual contributions? Capture your understandings here:

• Kirk: how agile methodology works; DevOps; help teammates fulfill tasks
• Nelson: make a positive contribution; get the project done
• Jack: more knowledge in creating a full on project; real world application; get a good project out; get along
• Melissa: start from scratch on practical application; produce something not only finished but usable

Team Goals

Discuss your collective learning goals for the capstone project. What do you want to gain from the experience? What would make you proud of your work as a team?

Create a finished, usable product by the end that is worth maintaining after we depart. Learn more about algorithms in a practical setting.

Team Coordination

Discuss any preferences for when you like to work, the technologies you might use to coordinate between meetings, your expectations for responsiveness, and any constraints that might limit when you are available. Consider potential roles you might need to coordinate your work during meetings or between meetings (scribe, contrarian, discussion facilitator, project coordinator, client contact, version control expert, etc.)

Evening probably doesn't work super well, but night is a possibility. Try to have advisor meetings during the day, if possible. Communicate mainly through slack. Keep everyone in the loop with client contact (email chain). Switch people for writing logs, and add logs to a wiki folder.

Idiosyncracies

Have each team member finish the following prompts:

• I find it annoying when other people...
• I know something about me that can annoy others is...

Personal space. Cutting people off. Balancing speed versus quality.