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PMP lesson · People & Team Leadership · Building the team · lesson 5 of 6 · about 6 minutes

Team charter and working agreements

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Goal: After this lesson you can explain what a team charter contains, why the team must create it together, and how to use it when problems arise.

1The situation

Three companies, three habits

The robot cell team includes the integrator's engineers, two agency contractors and the customer's automation specialists, across two sites for eighteen months.

In the first month, one group expects replies within an hour, another within two days. One group decides by consensus, another by the senior engineer. Meetings start late; people talk over each other.

None of this is bad will. Nobody ever agreed how the team would work.

2What a team charter is

A team charter (or set of working agreements) records the team's shared values, rules and ways of working. It is different from the project charter, which authorises the project.

Created by
The whole team
People follow rules they helped write.
Covers
How we work
Values, communication, decisions, meetings, conflict, quality.
Lives
All project long
Visible, used daily, reviewed and updated.
When a team-wide pattern appears (people late, decisions slow), the answer is usually: the team revisits its working agreement together, not the PM imposing new rules.

3What goes into a team charter

Values

Safety first · respect · honesty · help each other

Working agreements

Core hours · meeting rules · response times · how we review code and drawings

Decision-making

Which decisions need consensus, which the owner makes, how to escalate

Communication

Tools, channels, when to call instead of email, time zones

Conflict

Talk directly first; how disagreements are resolved

Definition of done

(agile) What “finished” means for every item
Short and practical: one page the team actually uses.

4How it looks on the exam

Exam-style question 1. A new project combines the integrator's engineers, agency contractors and the customer's specialists in one team for eighteen months. Their expectations about hours, decision-making and tools differ. What should the project manager do at the start?
A. Issue team rules based on the integrator's policies
B. Allow each group to keep its own practices
C. Facilitate the creation of a team charter with all three groups
D. Wait until conflicts arise
Show the answer and the decode
Answer: C.
In simple English
Mixed team with different habits.
What is the question really asking?
What to do at the start.
Key words / trigger
“expectations … differ”
PMP logic
A team charter created together sets shared expectations early.
Why the wrong answer looks attractive
The company's standard rules seem efficient, but the other groups didn't help create them.

5Remember this

Your memory card

  • Team charter = values + working agreements + decision rules + communication
  • Created by the whole team; visible; used daily
  • Team pattern → revisit the agreement together; individual issue → private talk
  • Review in retrospectives and when members change
The full lesson in the PMCLEAR app also has:
  • the rest of the lesson (Ground rules vs individual issues)
  • a worked example
  • the common traps (wrong vs right)
  • 2 exam-style questions with the decode
  • a 3-question quick check
Open the full lesson → Create a free account
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