Ground Rules

Stakeholder technique · See it on the map

Guide only — Setting ground rules is done in the kickoff meeting itself.

A team's written agreement on how it will behave, made before any real disagreement tests it.

When to use it

At team formation, when a new team is assembled from different departments or organizations with different norms, or whenever a recurring behavior problem (talking over people, side deals outside meetings, missed commitments) needs a shared standard to point back to.

When to avoid it

Skip a formal ground-rules session for a short-lived, low-stakes team where informal norms will do — the ceremony costs more than the problem it prevents. Also skip it if you can't commit to enforcing whatever gets agreed: ground rules that exist only on a slide are worse than none, because they set an expectation the team learns not to trust.

Steps

1. Gather the team and ask what has caused friction on past projects, not just what sounds virtuous in the abstract.
2. Turn each answer into a specific, observable rule — 'raise disagreement in the room, not after' rather than 'be respectful'.
3. Get explicit agreement from everyone in the room, not just silence.
4. Write the rules down somewhere the team will actually see again.
5. Name, in advance, what happens when a rule is broken and who raises it.
6. Enforce the first violation visibly — this is what makes the rules real.

What it produces

• A short, specific, written list of agreed team behaviors.
• A named mechanism for raising and handling a violation.

Common pitfalls

• Rules agreed in an enthusiastic kickoff session that nobody enforces the first time one is broken — after that, everyone knows they're decorative, and they're gone.
• Writing rules so generic ('communicate openly') that no one can point to a specific violation, so enforcement never has anything concrete to act on.
• One person setting the rules and presenting them for sign-off rather than drawing them out of the team, which produces compliance instead of buy-in.

Worked example

A cross-agency data-migration team, three organizations working together for the first time, agrees a ground rule that no scope decision made outside the weekly sync counts until it is reported back to the group. Six weeks in, one partner's lead tries to commit a schedule change in a side conversation. The project manager points to the rule in the next sync, the change is reopened for the full group, and the rule holds for the rest of the project because that first test was enforced rather than let slide.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §13.3.2.4

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.