Team charter & working agreement builder

A team charter is a short, written working agreement your team writes together at the start of a course - before a deadline crunch forces the conversation. It covers how you'll meet, communicate, make decisions, hold each other accountable, and what "done" means, so disagreements get resolved against something you all agreed to, not whoever's loudest in the moment.

The nine things worth deciding as a team before your first deliverable is due:

1. Team & members. Who's on the team, for which course and term.
2. Goals & ambition. Are you optimizing for the top grade, a strong and efficient result, or just passing efficiently because your real focus is elsewhere this term? Say it out loud - mismatched ambition is where team conflict usually starts.
3. Roles & ownership. Who coordinates, who integrates the final deliverable, who checks quality, who talks to faculty.
4. Meetings. Cadence and the small norms that keep them short.
5. Communication. Which channel is primary, and what response time is reasonable to expect.
6. Quality bar & deadlines. What "done" actually means, and how much internal buffer you build before the real deadline.
7. Decisions. How you'll decide when you don't all agree, and what always needs the whole team's input.
8. Conflict & accountability. What happens when someone misses a commitment, and how disagreements escalate.
9. Commitment. A short statement everyone signs, and a date to revisit it.

MBA team projects compress a semester of group work into a few intense weeks, often with teammates who have very different calendars - recruiting, travel, a full-time job for part-time and executive students. A charter doesn't prevent every disagreement, but it turns "you never said that" into "let's check what we agreed to," which is a much faster conversation to have at 11pm before a deadline.