The Team Canvas — The How to

Source http://theteamcanvas.com/use/

Objective

The team’s members, together with the facilitator, will work together to create the team canvas which represents the team’s purpose, goals, stakeholders, and the relevant data and processes to achieve the team’s objectives, personal objectives, and the methodology on how to win it.

Clarity and alignment, openness, honesty are the must-have attributes of the session.

Preparation for the session

Duration 90–120 minutes at least.

Participants 2–8 people, the team members, and the ones that work daily with the team.

Facilitation Team Lead or External Facilitator.

Materials

1. The Team Canvas
2. Sticky Notes with different colors
3. Sharpies or pens to write on stickies
4. A device with a timer function
5. Distraction-Free space.

Running the session

Rules of Engagement for the Team Meeting

“Good communication among coworkers drives effective knowledge sharing, decision making, coordination, and, ultimately, performance results. But in global teams, varying levels of fluency with the chosen common language are inevitable — and likely to heighten social distance. The team members who can communicate best in the organization’s lingua franca (usually English) often exert the most influence, while those who are less fluent often become inhibited and withdraw. Mitigating these effects typically involves insisting that all team members respect three rules for communicating in meetings.”

Tsedal Neeley

Introduction

Open the session by explaining the tool, the purpose it serves, the necessity of everyones’ honest and full commitment. The rules of debate and engagement.

Refer the team to the timer and the necessity to keep up with it. But feel free, as a facilitator to add 10% to 25% extra time in case there is a need, you should mention it before diving into the first step.

For each step, the facilitator will read the questions and should have examples ready. But the goal is not to guide by examples, tend to guide by clarifying the questions.

Mention that in the following steps, only the stickies that have the full agreement of the team can be added to the board. For the rest of the steps, there is no need to have a consensus by the team.

• (Step 1) People and Roles
• (Step 2) Common Goals
• (Step 4) Purpose
• (Step 5) Values
• (Step 9) Rules and Activities

1. People & Roles

• Time: 5 minutes
• Is consensus needed? Yes.

Ask people to put their names on stickies, as well as their roles. If a person has multiple roles, use separate post-its.

Questions:

1. What are our names?
2. What are the roles we have in the team?
3. How are we called as a team?

Examples:

• Nir: Tech Lead & Scrum Master
• Asaf: Developer
• Lyna: QA

2. Common goals

• Time: 10 minutes
• Is consensus needed? Yes.
• Prerequisite: They should be aware of the tasks they were assigned for the next quarter. At least one quarter ahead.

Ask the team to agree on common goals.

Questions:

1. What you as a group really want to achieve?
2. What is our key goal that is feasible, measurable, and time-bounded?

Examples:

• Have a scalable end-2-end Session Replay for Apps by end of Q1, 2021
• Build support tools to reduce bug fixes and error tracing by end of Q3, 2021

3. Personal goals

• Time: 5 minutes
• Is consensus needed? No.
• Prerequisite: They should be aware of the tasks they were assigned for the next quarter. At least one quarter ahead.

Ask the team members about their personal goals they have for the project.

Questions:

1. What are our individual personal goals for this project?
2. Are there personal agendas that we want to open up?

Examples:

• Improve my Scala Skills [Asaf]
• Build automation pipeline for both products [Lyna]

4. Purpose

• Time: 10 minutes
• Is consensus needed? Yes.

Ask the team to go one step beyond their common goal, and ask them why they do what they do.

Questions:

1. Why are we doing what we are doing in the first place?
2. What is something more important, which makes us pursue our common goal?

Examples:

• Create a positive impact on people’s lives through engineering innovation
• Make people’s lives easier and stress-free through our team innovation.

5. Values

• Time: 10 minutes
• Is consensus needed? Yes.

Ask the team what are the core values — the most important principles — that they want to share within the team. The team should agree on values, so everyone accepts the final set.

Questions:

1. What do we stand for?
2. What are guiding principles?
3. What are the common values that we want to be at the core of our team?

Examples:

• Trust
• Creativity
• Quality
• Transparency
• Mutual understanding
• Equality
• Respect

6. Strengths & Assets

• Time: 15 minutes
• Is consensus needed? No.

Ask the team to share the key pieces of skills (both hard skills and soft skills) and assets available within the team. Don’t dismiss ‘insignificant’ stuff. You might find that the team has the capacity for martial arts, running marathons, or persuading people. Encourage people to share something about themselves, as well as note important qualities they see in their teammates.

Questions:

1. What are the skills we have in the team that will help us to achieve our goals?
2. What are the interpersonal/soft skills that we have?
3. What are we good at, individually and as a team?

Examples:

• Coding (GOLANG, Java, C#)
• Functional Programming
• Being visionary
• Religious Energy
• Kafka Experts
• Photography

7. Weaknesses & Risks

• Time: 15 minutes
• Is consensus needed? No.

Ask the team to share the key weaknesses and areas for improvement that they see in themselves, as well as obstacles they face as a team. Make an accent on reporting what people can find in themselves, rather than discussing other’s weaknesses.

Questions

1. What are the weaknesses we have, individually and as a team?
2. What our teammates should know about us?
3. What are some obstacles we see ahead of us that we are likely to face?

Examples

• Easily distracted [Asaf]
• Can be arrogant [Nir]
• Lack of structured communication [Samuel]

8. Needs & Expectations

• Time: 10 minutes
• Is consensus needed? No.

Ask the team to express the needs they have in order to be successful. Think of this as a follow-up to the previous two sections: once team members expressed their strengths and weaknesses, they should be able to express the needs they have to amplify strengths and be at their best despite the weaknesses.

Questions

1. What does each member of the team need to be successful?
2. How the team could help each member with their needs?

Examples

• Some «me time»
• More clear weekly status updates
• Pair programming session
• Trust
• Fun
• Stability
• More code reviews and documentation
• Coding standards
• Short Daily updates without unrelated 1:1 syncs

9. Rules & Activities

• Time: 10 minutes
• Is consensus needed? Yes.

Ask the team to agree on common rules and activities. Think of this as of outcome of the previous sections: a concrete set of rules and activities they want to implement.

Questions

1. What are the rules we want to introduce after doing this session?
2. How do we communicate and keep everyone up to date?
3. How do we make decisions?
4. How do we execute and evaluate what we do?

Examples

• Code Review is a daily task for everyone.
• Allocate time for writing tests when planning.
• Tasks are defined by the results & how can be tested.
• Non-important communication in Slack and not emails
• The design has to be signed off by everyone after reading & understanding everything.
• Refactoring others’ code requires to sync session with the original code owner/writer.
• Every commit has a ticket id as a prefix

10. Wrap up

• Time: 5 minutes.

As you close The Team Canvas workshop, ask the team members to tell about one single most important insight that they gained during the workshop.

Strategy

When using complete Team Canvas, it is good to keep in mind that it consists of 4 parts:

1. What the team is: roles and goals (both common and personal).
2. Why the team is doing what it’s doing: purpose and values.
3. Who are the team members: their strengths, weaknesses, and needs.
4. How the team is going to achieve what it needs to achieve: rules and activities.

As a facilitator of the session, you might be often asked something like this: ‘How are we supposed to answer this question? What is that you expect us to say here?’, etc. It is important to understand that The Team Canvas creates a context for the team, rather than content, and therefore all answers are valid. Gently reply to such questions: ‘How would you answer if you knew? What do you think the answer should be?’

It would be a good idea to park conversations that seem to take too much time for the team and arrange separate meetings to address these issues.

It’s recommended to repeat Team Canvas sessions once in a while, especially when new team members join.

The Idea behind The Team Canvas

Different blog post