Ground rules are policies and guidelines that are to be made by the project group and intended to help individual members. They must be clear, consistent, agreed-to, and followed by the team members. The purpose of ground rules is to adhere to the agreed style of working, which directly impacts the project's success.
We have seen that ground rules add value to the overall team communication, participation, cooperation, and support, as these are meant to address the behavioral aspects of project delivery.
The following are some of the top areas where ground rules are seen effective and, hence, should be created:
- Team meetings
- For example, the ground rule for stand up meetings could be just highlighting in brief the key accomplishments and challenges per track/lead
- Communication
- Verbal communications are a must and soft skills are important traits to have for the project team members. However, sharing relevant information with the impacted stakeholders in a formal mode is recommended as a ground rule
- Team culture
- Key decisions
- A ground rule in communication could be to document all the key decisions in a common repository, available to the concerned project stakeholders
- Logistics
- Ground rules for in-person workshops and virtual meetings
- Terminologies and abbreviations
- Team members must agree on any kind of abbreviations and terminologies and host the list in a team site accessible to all.
- This ensures less assumption in communication.
- Proactive management of risks and issues
- Every team member must take up the ownership of bring up issues and risk proactively and as well as potential ways of reducing/solving it.
- Risk and issues brings in a lot unknowns and lesser the unknowns in a project, higher would be the chance of achieving success timely.
- Vacation and time off
- A ground rule in project time off could be to seek leave approval from the project manager for any leaves more than a week, and approval should be at least be two months in advance
- Workload/priority conflicts
- The single most factor which could derail any project.
- Work prioritization ensure efficiency, stronger collaboration within and outside team and helps in bringing stakeholders on the same page.
While a number of ground rules can be created, we recommend that you ensure agreement and commitment from the stakeholders before formalizing a rule.