As we have seen, effective teamwork requires strong communication, but also systematic strategies and processes that help the team stay organized and function productively. Excellent teams have synergy that makes them more than simply the sum of their parts. The term “team intelligence” refers to the fact that collectively, teams have more knowledge and skill than the single individuals working separately. Working together allows for greater efficiency and innovation. However, challenges can also arise when working in a team.  Many of these challenges can be addressed by using effective management strategies, including team documents.

Below, you will find a list of strategies and descriptions of various kinds of team documents that are designed to help teams handle some of the challenges of collaboration and ensure that teams function effectively.

Team Documents

There are many types of documents specifically designed to help teams run smoothly and productively. There are also software applications, like Monday and Slack, that have many of these genres built into them, but you can also create simple versions of these in a word document. Some examples, described in more detail below, include using the following documents:

Team Charter: outlines the guiding principles, rules, processes, and expectations agreed upon by the team

Meeting Agenda: outlines the main points for discussion at a meeting

Meeting Minutes: records the decisions and relevant points discussed at a meeting

Gantt Charts and Work Plans: helps teams plan out each step of the project, visualize the timeline, and keep track of who is responsible for what and when.

Status/Progress Reports: records the completed tasks and work left to complete

Work Logs: records the tasks and time spent for each team member

Team Charters

A Team Charter is a document created by all team members, ideally before starting the project, that identifies the team’s agreed upon goals, values, strategies, and plans for how everyone will work together. Team charters can take many forms and can serve a variety of functions depending on the context. In the business world, they often define the purpose, duration, scope and goals of team projects in term of the desired output. They also list team members, resources, deliverables, reporting systems, and so on. In the working world, a team charter may have an audience that extends beyond the immediate team members. For example, if teams need external support in dealing with a problem, an outside facilitator may review the Team Charter to see what guidelines need to be followed in solving the problem.

For our purposes, in an educational setting, we will use a Team Charter as a way for each team to define their own goals, values, expectations, guidelines, strategies, and procedures – and make sure everyone is “on the same page.” Doing this at the beginning of the project helps set the team up for success and prevent typical problems related to misaligned goals, unclear roles, and miscommunication around expectations and processes. Keep in mind that someone outside of the team (facilitator, instructor, etc) may use your Team Charter to help you resolve internal issues, so all information will need to make sense to an external audience.

Here are some questions to consider as a team when negotiating and creating your team charter:

Who are the team members? along with names, you might include contact information. You might consider identify team members’ individual goals, strengths, and weaknesses as a way to help determine the roles each person will take on in the team. Identifying relevant strengths and weaknesses can help you anticipate potential opportunities and challenges you might encounter during the team project (SWOC analysis). For example, if some team members acknowledge that they are prone to procrastination, your team might set artificial internal deadlines for getting work done well before the official due date. Someone who likes to be super organized might take on the role of team scheduling coordinator.

What is the team’s purpose and goals? The team should be able to collectively articulate the purpose of the project and the goals you want to achieve. It is important to discuss the relationship between goals and commitment level: if your goal is to exceed expectations (e.g. achieve an A+ grade), this requires a stronger commitment to putting in the additional time and effort required. If your goal is to meet expectations (achieve a B grade), discuss what means in terms of time commitment.

Communication Channels: How will you communicate during the project both in and outside of class? Will you use a messaging app for short questions and reminders? Zoom for online team meetings? A word processing app (like Google docs) for shared documents that you all collaborate on? Or will you use Microsoft Teams for all team communications?

Expectations and Guidelines: Discuss your values around respect, courtesy, commitment and accountability. When devising rules, expectations and potential consequences, strive to make them reasonable and compassionate, remembering that we are all human and sometimes make mistakes or let people down.

• • What does respectful and constructive interactions look like to you? How can you ensure that all team members feel safe to communicate their ideas and concerns in a constructive manner? What is the expected reply time for messages?
  • When, how, and how often will you meet as a team to work collaboratively? What are your expectations around punctuality and staying on task during meetings? How will you maintain focus to avoid getting distracted or off-task?
  • What are your expectations for the quality of work the team aims to submit? How will you ensure quality control? What kind of time commitment are you will to make to ensure combined work meets the team’s expectations?
  • What are your strategies for maintaining equitable workloads, dividing tasks fairly, and getting work done on time? How will you ensure that the workload feels fair and reasonable to all team members?
  • How will you make decisions as a team? Will you strive to reach consensus? Vote? How about when a decision must be made quickly in a crisis? Will you give one or more team members “executive decision-making” authority?
  • How will you deal with emergent issues (such as a team member becoming ill or unavailable)?

Project Management Tools and Strategies: how will you keep track of tasks, documents, resources, etc? Will you create a Work Plan? Gantt Chart? Linear Responsibility Chart? Use Agendas and Minutes to keep team meetings organized and document decisions/progress? Who will be responsible for these? Will you use an online app like Slack, Monday, or MS Teams? How will you evaluate the performance of your team?

Design Aesthetic: depending on what type of project you are working on, you may want to define your Style Guide or design aesthetic by providing clear guidelines on what your team documents will look like. Consider choosing your font styles (for various levels of headings, body text, and caption text), colour palette, table design, margins, paragraph alignment, etc., so that all team members are creating work that has a consistent look.

Team Policies: Your team should create a clear policy on “Use of Generative AI” that is consistent with your course Academic Integrity Policy and that all team members agree to abide by. You should also outline some conflict management strategies consistent with the previous information.

How will you ensure that all team members remain accountable and abide by the guidelines outlined in your team charter? If someone does not meet the expectations laid out in the Team Charter, what are the consequences?

If your team experiences conflict that they cannot resolve, how will you proceed? Devise policies that clearly indicate what steps you will take internally, and when interventions should be requested.

NOTE: If a team member’s actions or inactions are negatively impacting the team’s progress or quality of work, you should alert your supervisor/instructor/TA.

Irreconcilable Differences: At what point should someone leave the team? What are the protocols for quitting a team or firing a team member if problems cannot be resolved? This should be a multi-step process that includes problem-solving strategies, consultation with instructor/TA, and clear documentation.

At the end of your Team Charter, it’s a good idea to have a place for all team members to officially sign off on the agreement – it’s like signing a contract you all agree to abide by.

Meeting Documents: Agendas and Minutes

For team meetings to be productive and efficient, you should plan the meeting and keep track of the progress made for future reference. Agendas and Minutes are documents that do this. A meeting also should have a chair (the person who keeps an eye on the agenda to make sure the meeting stays on track) and a recorder (who records important information discussed at the meeting, and what decisions were made).

The Agenda is the plan for what you want to discuss and accomplish at the meeting. It is usually made up of a list of items, sometimes with a time frame for each item.

Minutes follow up on the agenda by recording what decisions were made and what important topics were discussed. One person is responsible for recording the events of the meeting, and distributing the minutes to each member. That way, no one should forget what tasks they agreed to complete and when.

NOTE:  In the professional world, Agendas and Minutes are generally much more complicated, reflecting the fact that meetings are often run using Roberts Rules of Order. The simplified examples here should work fine for your team projects in a course.

Gantt Charts and Work Plans

When planning a complex team project over a significant time span, a team will often create a Work Plan to provides a detailed map of what tasks need to get done, when, and by whom. This can be created using a spreadsheet, word document, or an app like MS Projects, Slack, or Monday. A Gantt Chart can also be used to provide a quick visual summary of the work schedule in a clear and detailed way. Gantt charts are typically used in proposals, to show the target audience that the proposers have a well-thought out and feasible plan for completing the project. They can also be used in progress reports to update the reader on what tasks are complete, which are in progress, and which are yet to be completed.

Gantt charts can take different forms, but generally provide a simplified visual chart of what tasks will be done when, in relation to other tasks. You can download complicated software to make detailed Gantt Charts, but you can also use a simple table. See the sample Gantt chart below, showing the kinds of tasks you might include in a Research Project Proposal. The sample lists fairly generic tasks; ideally, your chart will include more specific information, such as what kind of existing designs you might research, what specific kind of user experience, and a Literature review of what, specifically?

Where a Gantt Chart offers a simple visual that can be taken in at a glance, a Work Plan is a more detailed “master plan” that allows the team to track what has been completed, what is in progress, and what is yet to be done – and indicates who has primary responsibility for which tasks, what tasks depend on the completion of other tasks, who will review the work, and so on. Creating a Work Plan shortly after beginning the project is an excellent way to engage in thorough task analysis so that the team can get a full picture of exactly what work needs to be done to complete the project, how the various tasks integrate and line up time-wise, and who needs to do what and when. It requires you to review the task requirements, assessment rubrics, formative deliverables that might be due along the way, and devise a detailed plan for how to accomplish all of the work that needs to be done. You will update your Work Plan frequently to indicate where you are in the plan.

Remember to build in considerable time for integrating work that team members have completed separately, to ensure that it is consistent in terms of content, style, and document design. This generally takes far more time than you might think, especially if moving from one platform (Google docs) to another (MS Word). Moving from a cloud-based to a desktop platform can seriously alter your formatting, which takes time to fix. It’s a lot like debugging code!

Status Reports

Status reports are similar to Progress Reports (and are sometimes used interchangeably), in that they provide information on the status of your project. These are very common documents, as project partners and interested parties want to be kept apprised of how projects are going. A status report can update your instructor, supervisor, or client on the current state of the project and how things are going. A more detailed Progress Report covers more ground in that it reviews what has been done, what is in progress, and what is still yet to be done, and what problems you may have encountered. A key goal of these reports is to reassure your audience that everything is going according to plan and budget – or if it’s not on track, to explain why, present an updated plan, and perhaps ask for assistance or additional resources

Work Logs

Work logs are common documents used in the work place (and in your Co-op Work Terms) to keep track of what work is done, by whom, and how long it took. These can be very helpful for keeping a team on track and ensuring equitable workloads. In the workplace, they can also be super helpful when you need to refer to previous work in a report, or want to look back on work done several weeks earlier and reflect on what strategies worked well and what might need rethinking. If you compare each team member’s work log, you will quickly see if some team members are doing more work than others. To ensure accountability, have each team member sign off on the work log.

Post Project Review

In professional contexts, conducting a Post Project Review (PPR) and documenting the “lessons learned” during the project is generally considered to be an essential end-of-project activity and a tool for “continuous improvement.” If done well, reflecting on the lessons learned not only provides valuable insights into what made the project successful, but also identifies potential areas for improvement; reflection helps you to successfully build on your team’s successes and refine teamwork and project management strategies for future projects. The saying goes, “we learn from experience” and learn from our mistakes; but this is only true if we reflect on our experiences and mistakes and actively consider what we can learn from them. Indeed, sometimes we can learn more from failure than from success!

A PPR report typically contains the following elements:

Project purpose and goals: summarize the project’s overall purpose and key goals

Project performance: reflect on how well the project achieved the intended goals. What were the key highlights/successes? Failures?  What challenges did you encounter? Acknowledge team member contributions and how they impacted the outcome of the project.

Team processes and performance: describe the team processes you put in place and evaluate their effectiveness at keeping the team on track and working productively and equitably. The team leader or manager might evaluate individual team members’ performance here as well.

Lessons learned: what key take-aways can you extract from the above information and the experience of working on this project? Identify specific strategies that worked very well that you would use again. Identify areas that need improvement, and what specific steps you would take in future projects to produce better results.

Goals/Recommendations: going forward, what concrete recommendations can you offer, based on the experience of working on this project, to improve future planning, communication, and project/risk management?

Reflecting on the successes and failures ensures that we learn from both – indeed, if we fail to learn from mistakes, we tend to just keep repeating them. Reflecting is a crucial part of the continuous improvement process and helps us to set goals for future growth.