The team has two critical tasks this week, one is the preparation for the pitch dry run, and the second is the development of the team charter.

Examine and Analyze

With the time differences and challenges we’re having with synchronous collaboration (‘Embracing Asynchronous Communication’ 2021), we opted for most of the team (3/4 members) to work on the pitch practice deck while I focus on the team charter. I was nervous about this at first, but after raising my concerns, it was clear that there would be plenty of time to contribute meaningfully to the final pitch deck and presentation in later weeks.

I have not worked on a team charter previously and do not consider documentation of this nature a natural strong point. Developing a team charter is an excellent opportunity to engage in some deliberate practice.

Initially sceptical on the real-world value of a team charter, I started exploring the purpose.

Group members generally (although often mistakenly) assume that everyone holds the same expectations. As long as expectations are met, no major conflicts arise. (Byrd and Luthy 2010)

Since our team has had a few significant disruptions, I was now confident in need of such a charter and set about it with renewed vigour.

I set out to try and use the charter to resolve what I thought were some of our essential requirements: review and resolve conflicts over time differences develop a mission statement to bind us together document some best practices

Requirements

Strengths / Competitive Advantage Diverse Team, Skills and Experience Ideas / Options Work as an effective team to produce a high quality pitch, demo and series of documented learnings. Develop our team and produce a publishable quality game. Produce a game design and pitch which will excite players and help people think more about sustainability.

Learnings and Actions

While researching the development of an effective team charter, it was clear that many benefits are achieved from an effective mission statement. (Martin et al. 2017)

Frameworks for building effective mission statements exist (Cochran et al. 2008), (Baetz and Bart 1996) but focus on large teams or established businesses and can be unwieldy for a short academic team project. I distilled these frameworks down to a few key requirements One or two objectives are more effective. Define the stakeholders Include our strengths or competitive advantage

The Wild Branch is committed to making games that can grow with the ever changing audiences of today, through humorous puzzle adventures.

The final mission statement was collaboratively developed by the team based on the objectives researched.

We didn’t develop our team charter until week 6, which is unusual in most teams, as this is halfway through our module. It’s feasible that by developing our team charter after we experienced some issues, we are now a stronger team for it. However, it’s also possible that we could have avoided some of these issues by developing our team charter immediately as we formed. In future teamwork, I will set out a team mission and goal at the formation.

References

  • BAETZ, Mark C. and Christopher K. BART. 1996. ‘Developing Mission Statements Which Work’. Long Range Planning 29(4), 526–33.

  • BYRD, John T. and Michael R. LUTHY. 2010. ‘Improving Group Dynamics: Creating a Team Charter’. The Academy of Educational Leadership Journal 14, 13.

  • COCHRAN, D., F. DAVID and C. K. GIBSON. 2008. ‘A Framework for Developing an Effective Mission Statement’. Journal of Business Strategies 25, 27.

  • ‘Embracing Asynchronous Communication’. 2021. GitLab [online]. Available at: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchronous/ [accessed 6 Jun 2021].

  • MARTIN, Eric M., Ian COWBURN and Andrew MAC INTOSH. 2017. ‘Developing a Team Mission Statement: Who Are We? Where Are We Going? How Are We Going to Get There?’ Journal of Sport Psychology in Action 8(3), 197–207.