Ground rules are constraints and guidelines that are to be made by the project group and intended to help individual members. They must be clear, consistent, agreed to, and followed by the team members. The purpose of ground rules is to adhere to the agreed style of working, which directly impacts the project's success.

The following are some of the top areas where ground rules are seen to be effective and, hence, should be created:

• Team meetings: For example, the ground rule for stand-up meetings could be just highlighting, in brief, the key accomplishments and challenges per track/lead.
• Communication: Verbal communications are a must and soft skills are important traits to have for the project team members. However, sharing relevant information with the impacted stakeholders in a formal mode is recommended as a ground rule.
• Team culture: We must ensure to factor in various cultural aspects while executing a project in the region intended and based on the various backgrounds of team members.
• Key decisions: A ground rule in communication could be to document all of the key decisions in a common repository, available to the concerned project stakeholders.
• Logistics: This includes ground rules for in-person workshops and virtual meetings.
• Terminologies and abbreviations: Team members must agree on any kind of abbreviations and terminologies and host the list in a team site accessible to all. This ensures less assumption in communication.
• Proactive management of risks and issues: Every team member must take up ownership of bringing up issues and risk proactively as well as potential ways of reducing/solving them. Risk and issues bring in a lot of unknowns. The lesser the unknowns in a project, the higher the chance of achieving timely success.
• Vacation and time off: A ground rule in project time off could be to seek leave approval from the project manager for any leaves of more than a week, and approval should be at least be two months in advance.
• Workload/priority conflicts: This is the single most important factor that could derail any project. Work prioritization ensures efficiency, stronger collaboration within and outside the team, and helps to bringing stakeholders together on the same page.

While several ground rules can be created, we recommend that you ensure agreement and commitment from the stakeholders before formalizing a rule.

These ground rules, the project charter, and the project plan are usually shared with the team in a kickoff meeting.