CS486
Guidelines for Team Bylaws/Standards


Requirements
Your team is to develop and document a set of team standards. Establishing standards for your team is critical to the team's ability to work efficiently and effectively. Standards range from the assignment of roles to team members to establishing rules for the look and feel of team documents. Without these norms teams have difficulty communicating and cooperating since each individual may have a different interpretation of how things should be done.

Specifications
 As with any document, the team standards should consist of a cover page containing the team's name and identifying all members of the team. Additionally a table of contents and a brief abstract of the document's contents should be included. The remainder of the document should include:

  1. Roles - The section includes the assignment of roles to particular individuals as well as a clear definition of what the role involves. Roles should include, but are not limited to:
      1.1 Leader - The person who coordinates and runs meetings. Not a dictator.
    1.2 Communicator - The person who is responsible for all communications between the team and outside entities.
    1.3 Recorder - The person who keeps and distributes detailed notes of all meetings and maintains the team notebook.
    1.4 Facilitator - Person who acts in a neutral role to help resolve disputes. The facilitator should also help ensure sound meeting structure (e.g., only one person talks at a time, etc.).
  2. Meetings - This section clearly describes when and where standing meetings will occur as well as to establish a standard agenda for all meetings. It should include, but is not limited to:
      2.1 Weekly time for all outside meetings - everyone must be available.
    2.2 Standard agenda - Orders of business remain fairly typical except in cases of emergency meetings.
    2.3 Decision Strategy - How decisions will be made by the group. (unanimous agreement, simple majority vote, 2/3 majority vote, arm wrestling, etc.)
    2.4 Minutes - How soon after a meeting will meeting minutes be distributed to team members. In what medium will they be delivered (e.g., e-mail, hardcopy, posted to website)?
    2.5 Attendance Rules - How many times will team members be allowed to miss meetings? (with or without advanced notice) What will be the consequences for (a) one missed meeting (b) additional missed meetings? How will the team deal with members who show up late for meetings? Essentially this establishes the basis for disciplinary action in case someone is slacking!
    2.6 Conflict Resolution Strategy - How will the team handle interpersonal disputes, divided team, nonparticipating members, team members who change the design without team consent, etc.?
  3. Document Standards - This section should clearly describe how team documents will be handled. It must include, but is not limited to:
      3.1 Word Processor Version - Which WP will be used affects how many people can easily contribute to the documents.
    3.2 Coordination - Who will be responsible for pulling together individual efforts into a team document?
    3.3 Version Control - How will all team members know which version is the most current? How will the team be able to "roll back" to a previous version? Unix RCS and SCCS tools are great for this.
    3.4 Format - General look and feel for all team documents should be established early. This includes: structure, font style, font size, page numbering, cover page, table of contents format, etc.
    3.5 Review Process - All document drafts must be completed in time for a team review before the final draft is submitted. Decide when individual components must be delivered to the coordinator, when the draft will be available for review, the format of the review process.
  4. Self Evaluation Method - This section should clearly describe how the team will periodically assess its efficiency, effectiveness and progress. It must include, but is not limited to:
      4.1 When - Determine how often this self-evaluation will be necessary. Schedule these and stick to the schedule.
    4.2 How - Will these reviews take the form of informal discussions, some type of rating scale, anonymous evaluations of teammates, etc.?
  5. Standards for Behavior/Cooperation - The section should address the expected behavior of team members involved in the project. It must include, but is not limited to:
      5.1 Design Changes - Who can make design changes and is team consent required?
    5.2 Meeting Behavior - Address such issues as: side talk during meetings; talking out of turn; being recognized to speak; punctuality; etc.