A-Team Tools

A collection of resources for understanding and applying lightweight agile practices to your scientific project

This project is maintained by betterscientificsoftware

Project Team Policies Template

This template is intended as a resource for teams that want to establish policies for team interactions. Establishing policies can be an effective team building activity. Having and following team policies can set proper expectations and improve team dynamics.

Project Team Policies

The following policies are meant to guide team members in their activities, establishing expectations for ongoing work.

  1. Team members will conduct themselves in a professional manner, observing institutional policies given to them at student, faculty and staff orientation.
  2. Initiation, transition and exit events will be guided by creating and following an event checklist.
  3. All work will be tracked in the organization issues-only repository .
  4. All work, notes and relevant content will be kept in a repository associated with the team GitHub organization.
  5. Each team member will have an individual repository under the teams organization: Lastname-Firstname-Work. This repo contains:
    1. Thesis or dissertation, as appropriate.
    2. Annotated bibliography of resources.
    3. Personal notes from project meetings and research activities.
  6. If work is appropriate for one of the team repos, it will be retain there. Otherwise, it is kept in the team member’s individual repo.
  7. Team members will update project Kanban board prior to team meetings, more frequently if particularly active.
  8. Exceptions to these policies are acceptable, but:
    1. Important exceptions should be approved before acting.
    2. Other exceptions should mentioned at next team meeting or before.
    3. Exceptions should be infrequent.
    4. If an exception is frequent, actions or policies should be updated.
  9. Any concerns not addressed by team policies should be discussed with project leader.

Copy and paste the template below as a starting point for defining your own team policies.

## Project Team Policies

The following policies are meant to guide team members in their activities, establishing expectations for ongoing work.

1. Team members will conduct themselves in a professional manner, observing institutional policies given to them at student, faculty and staff orientation.
1. Initiation, transition and exit events will be guided by creating and following an event checklist.
1. All work will be tracked in the organization issues-only repository <enter link here>.
1. All work, notes and relevant content will be kept in a repository associated with the team GitHub organization.  
1. Each team member will have an individual repository under the teams organization: Lastname-Firstname-Work.  This repo contains:
    1. Thesis or dissertation, as appropriate.
    1. Annotated bibliography of resources.
    1. Personal notes from project meetings and research activities.
1. If work is appropriate for one of the team repos, it will be retain there.  Otherwise, it is kept in the team member's individual repo.
1. Team members will update project Kanban board prior to team meetings, more frequently if particularly active.
1. Exceptions to these policies are acceptable, but:
    1. Important exceptions should be approved before acting.
    1. Other exceptions should mentioned at next team meeting or before.
    1. Exceptions should be infrequent. 
    1. If an exception is frequent, actions or policies should be updated.
1. Any concerns not addressed by team policies should be discussed with project leader.