Team Charter

Scoping Outline:

Challenges:

• What: "Create ways to..." / "Redesign the..."
  • Provide a product that supports creating and delivering custom computer lab exercises.
• For Whom: "For <user>... (considering <other stakeholders>)..."
  • Anyone who wants to learn cybersecurity and other computer science topics, especially instructors administering labs for class.
• Context: "In a world where..." / "Keeping in mind that..."
  • It is difficult to set up a computer lab, it can be tedious and repetitive.

Considerations:

• Goals: "We aim to..."
  • Automate it [What is it? Orchestration? Authoring? Administration? Managing student interaction?].
  • Improve student outcomes [In or outside our own system? Do we care?].
  • Provide building blocks for others to create content.
• Crux: "We really need to..."
  • Understand how students learn.

Framing Checklist:

We should discuss these qualities:

• You tried on some behaviors (like empathy and rapid prototyping) on a current project before launching a new one.
• Project is a human, subjective challenge (understanding people is key to the project success).
• Project is geared toward discovery (not optimization).
• Challenge can be solved with a product, service, or event, not a strategy or system (for your first project).
  • Not our first project, and we can practice concrete solutions in more narrowly scoped projects to begin immediately.
• Those most affected by the work are acknowledged as actors with agency, not simply receivers of outcomes.
• Framing doesn’t embed a solution.
• Framing doesn’t (unintentionally) assume the form of the solution.
• Framing doesn’t (unintentionally) presume people’s needs.
• Goal of the project work is clear without dictating the specific solution outcome.
• You and your team actually care about this challenge. (If not, why are you doing it?)

Note: Teams/Products Are Long-Lived

Many of the links below, and the template used for this charter, are for project scoping. Projects have limited, definite lifecycles - the project ends when the goal is accomplished, and the result is handed off to an operational team to run it.

This top-level team charter has an indefinite lifespan. It's meant to be revisited and revised (though it can also be replaced). The team charter helps us have a shared understanding of not just what we're making, but what we're maintaining and providing to our "customer" (even if we aren't necessarily selling our product/service).

External Resources

See https://dschool.sfo3.digitaloceanspaces.com/documents/Design-Project-Scoping-Guide_V7.pdf!

Also:

• https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/team-charter-development-5128
• https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/project-collaboration/team-charter
• https://dschool.stanford.edu/tools/design-project-scoping-guide
• https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/1-040-project-management-spring-2009/
• https://www.nasa.gov/reference/4-1-stakeholder-expectations-definition/