As an experienced Scrum Master with PSM certification and an Agile Coach, I facilitate teams’ progress toward common goals and focus on improving dynamics and performance. Throughout the years of my professional work, I have been responsible for supporting and enforcing the Scrum process and other rules that the team has agreed on.

Agnieszka Pawlicka

My role as a Business Analyst is to get the best understanding of the client's business and its surroundings. Focusing on end-users' needs and pains along with analyzing the market trends allows me to help you with mitigating any related risks.

Maciej Hubert

Whether you are launching a new project or adding a new team member to your team you want it to go as smooth as possible. It is not enough for you to have all the necessary information - the key is to have your employees **well informed**.

Keep on reading to find out how to create perfect onboarding documentation.

## What is project onboarding?

Project onboarding is the process of **adding resources to a project**. During the process, you gather resources and team members necessary to finish the project.

The goal of project onboarding is to ensure that everyone involved in the project understands the requirements and business objectives, knows their role and the expected outcome. Thanks to project onboarding potential new team members can **fully contribute to the project**, spend less time figuring out their individual tasks, which influences the overall duration and success of the project.

## Why do you need an efficient project onboarding process?

There are quite a few advantages that an efficient project onboarding process introduces like:

* time savings \- if your process is precisely prepared, you will need less time to educate each new team member
* reduces the ‘bus factor’ \- bus factor refers to the number of people in a team that would result in project failure if they were hit by a bus. This takes into consideration potential vacation, sick leaves and departures from the company. The most threatening bus factor is 1, the larger the bus factor value is, the better
* long-term maintenance strategy \- by paying attention to the new members you take care of the future of your project and team
* new team members understand the high-level architecture of your project

## Project onboarding documentation

Now that we tackled what a project onboarding documentation is you must be wondering how to create one? Let me explain. There are several ways to build onboarding documentation. They are complementary in a way, so it is good to maintain all of them. Here we present some key groups of documentation.

1. **test scenarios**: if written in BDD (behavior-driven development), test scenarios may serve as good documentation of functionalities. It will also be a base for further manual testing as well as automated scripts. If written in the early phases of the project, your client may also verify if that is what they expect from the application. Example of such test scenarios written in Gherkin:

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/663x250/055ade194c/test-scenarios.png)

1. **glossary**: consider creating a document containing definitions of objects, functionalities and whole areas - anything that has a specific name in your project. If there are a lot of such names, a glossary will help anybody who is not familiar it the domain of the project.
2. **FAQ section**: if some questions are asked over and over again and they can be easily documented, you should create a FAQ section in your project’s documentation. Thanks to that, a potential newcomer will look at those questions before asking anyone, which will speed up the onboarding process.
3. **[kick-off documentation](https://selleo.com/blog/how-good-kick-off-documentation-can-accelerate-your-project)**: if created, provide the newcomer with this document. Kick-off has some things in common with onboarding, so the document should help them with setting up the environment, gaining necessary accesses etc.

<Baner name={software-development} />

## Other ways to speed up the project onboarding process:

Having good onboarding documentation makes the process much easier, but there are also other things you can do to ensure a seamless onboarding:

1. **Record tutorial videos**: decide if you need short videos covering only basic paths or comprehensive set of movies mentioning all the functionalities. The short option will make it possible for newcomers to get a quick idea of what the application is about. The comprehensive option will help you with a detailed onboarding of a potential new member, especially if you deal with a big project. Maybe you want to have them both?
2. **Create a structure diagram of your system**: it should contain domains mapping of your apps and, additionally, the owners of each domain/part of the system. This is a very efficient way to show the complexity of the system along with internal and external dependencies.
3. **Set up an onboarding meeting**: if you have any documentation or artefacts prepared, the new member should probably get to know with them first. Although, it is hardly possible to cover all important aspects in written form, so you will need to answer the remaining questions yourself.

## Onboarding a new team member

It may happen that the new member of the project happens to become a new member of your team. There are some key steps you can take to successfully onboard a new team member:

1. **Articulate the work scope**, objectives and key responsibilities - let them know your expectations and their responsibilities
2. **Set the work schedule** \- during your first meeting talk about the team’s schedule, recurring meetings etc
3. **Talk about communication tools** \- show them what you use to communicate within the team, set up their account
4. **Introduce them to the rest of the team** \- it is an essential part of onboarding to integrate the new member with the rest of the team - you can take turns introducing yourselves or even schedule one-on-one meetings
5. **Do check-ups on them and other team members** \- do not micromanage, yet remember to regularly check on your new team member - ask them how the day went or if they have any questions

If you stick to those tips, everybody is going to not only feel welcome and comfortable but also like they know what to do and what is expected of them.

## Keep your onboarding artefacts up to date

It is super important to **validate your documentation on newcomers on a regular basis** - if they need a lot of assistance in sections that can be documented and solve the newcomer’s obstacles - then choose the form of documentation and prepare it.

**Maintain your documentation**, for instance, if after a few months after last onboarding, there were some changes that make your documentation deprecated - update it to keep it synced.

Make documentation **first-class citizen** in your project if you know it is a long-term project, it allows your developers and other project members to better understand your business, even validate some concepts and definitions.

## Conclusions

An onboarding process is all about **transferring the knowledge to your team members**, no matter if they are solely in-house developers or a part of a mixed team (in-house and outsourced). A well-documented one will spare you frustration and save lots of time for you and everyone involved.

Although it might take some time at first to get used to and create a good enough documentation, it will **definitely pay off in the future**.

If you need help a team that can develop your product and seamlessly integrate with your in-house developers, feel free to [contact us](https://selleo.com/custom-software-development-company).

Whether you are launching a new project or adding a new team member to your team you want it to go as smooth as possible. It is not enough for you to have all the necessary information - the key is to have your employees well informed.

How To Create Your Team’s Onboarding Documentation? Best Practices For Your Developer Onboarding Process

A “team” in the Agile sense is a small group of people, who work together on a project, nearly all of them on a full-time basis. A team should possess all the skills necessary to get the job done and entails shared accountability.

However, imagine passionates who **are highly motivated** and **engaged as a team**, who contribute directly towards achieving your business goals by **delivering exceptional digital products.**

What makes them do so? What are the secrets of **great teams**?

Below you can find **six key elements which I consider as valid and crucial for setting-up solid Agile teams**. We always keep them in the back of our mind when building and leading our Agile teams at Selleo and we recommend them to consider while setting up your own team.

### 1. Build upon a solid foundation

Incorporating **common values** in Agile teams is crucial to create a culture of work that is collaborative in the first place. It forms a solid foundation that brings together all team members and fosters integration. Collaboration simply means to work together to accomplish a task. Agile methodologies stress the benefits of working with cross-functional teams rather than working in functional silos. It promotes frequent communication and cooperation between team members which helps to avoid any misunderstandings and to get things done faster.

From our experience, team bondings and its dynamics get better with time and people are more productive when they trust each other and enjoy working together. It also takes time to understand how individual team member’s skills complement the skills of another peer.  At Selleo, we promote the way of **self-organising and self-managing** client-focused team, which is possible due to the flat and network structure of the company. Teams at Selleo are collocated in the office so they can easily integrate with each other not only through formal and scheduled meetings but also through small chitchats, informal discussions or common afterwork activities. Establishing a strong team is not about sending your team members to team building events and expecting greater results from the team. High-performing teams take some time to build so try to keep your teams together.

<ReadMore> Read also: [Agile Software Development Process – Everything You Need to Know](https://selleo.com/blog/agile-software-development-process-everything-you-need-to-know) </ReadMore>

### 2. Establish strong engineering practices

Beyond keeping the team together, it's really important to build the sequence of the best engineering practices like code reviews, continuous integration and deployment, sharing the codebase between all the software developers and a single coding standard to which all the programmers adhere. At Selleo, we have implemented **high-quality engineering practices**, like automated tests, builds and deployments as well as daily practices in code review and quality assurance of software development in order to increase the confidence of the team and the quality of the service they deliver. A better quality of code and lack of technical debt are achieved by the regular, rigorous refactoring during software development. High-performing agile teams are aware that strong engineering fundamentals are crucial for delivering great digital products.

### 3. Ensure continuous mentoring

In order to support individual team member’s development, there is a huge need for creating an environment where the peers can learn from each other. **Pair-programming sessions, TILs, code reviews, and feedback** - these are some of the instruments we use at Selleo on a daily basis as encouragement to share the knowledge across the teams. Mentoring is not just an activity for a junior member to learn from seniors. Everyone from the team can learn from each other in order to unlock their power as a whole to tackle diverse and sophisticated work.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/800x533/c48e4b07e1/teams.jpg)

When the team members work well together and have good relationships they also use informal discussions as a common way of sharing knowledge. They are motivated to share experience across the team because they have a common goal -  to deliver their work with the highest quality.

At Selleo. we love to **reward people who never stop learning**, never stop growing and never stop helping others to grow. We do our best to deliver to people everything they need to make them grow continuously, and we are aware that being helpful and sharing knowledge with the colleagues are the values which high-performing teams are equipped with. You can also help your teams by creating efficient and successful mechanisms for knowledge sharing across and beyond the team with management and various specialists.

<Baner name={scrum-master} />

### 4. Create a cross-functional team

High-performing Agile teams comprise individuals with a broad set of skills that are necessary to effectively accomplish the work from their backlog. Team members must be **open and highly motivated** and the team must have both the authority and the accountability to achieve the goals they have been given. Typical cross-functional team at Selleo can do a lot of different stuff because it includes software engineers who have expertise both on the back-end and/or front-end of the software product. It also may include e.g. designers, testers and user experience (UX) specialists, if those activities are necessary to get the work done as a team.  
The key aspect here is that the high-performance team should be able to **deliver the results of their work by combining their respective skills and talents**.

### 5. Communicate the big picture and goal

Team members work better when they know how their work is aligned with the overall goal and when it contributes to the bigger picture. It is not about picking up stories from the backlog without understanding what value it brings to the entire vision. This approach is not effective. It is important to invest time in communicating the bigger picture, the current priorities and goals to the team in order to **increase engagement and ownership**.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/800x533/230160ae0b/goals.jpg)

At Selleo we work according to the **Scrum and Agile methodology** and we always encourage the Product Owners to share their vision and goals to the Development Team at each stage of the project. We insist on communicating the vision early and often - this communication should start from the kickoff meeting and continue throughout the entire development cycle.  Common goals are important not only because they develop creativity and innovation but because they bring people together and encourage them to communicate problems and results. There is such a notion of ‘feature teams’ in Agile, where a team owns a particular area of the software application, but with a better understanding of the overall goal, they feel responsible for the project as a whole.

### 6. Empower the team with decision-making

In order for the Agile team to work effectively, the team members should be **empowered to make their own decisions**. As mentioned before they need to be presented with the bigger picture in order to set up their own goals in alignment with the overall goal. The team needs to understand what work is to be done but they are given the freedom to find their own solutions and ways of working. At Selleo, Agile teams work according to the best practices and when they have a feeling of total ownership, which again is possible due to flat and network structure, it creates much better results. Freedom in decision-making for the Agile teams creates a culture of creativity and an environment which promotes challenging tasks constructively.

## Closing thoughts

In essence, those six elements are crucial while setting-up the Agile teams, however, it takes some time and effort to build a high-performing team with strong fundamentals and broad set of skills.

We can observe our customers’ satisfaction growing from the cooperation with our Agile teams. We can ensure that, when the team is mature, has strong practices both on collaboration and engineering, and in addition is established with the freedom of decision-making and ownership it delivers much **better value to customer experience and improves overall service and product quality**.

After all, what makes a good team great is the ability to **focus on the common goal** which brings all the team members together and increases their engagement, interactions and communication.

It is also essential to instil positivity in team members and encourage them to share their knowledge and thoughts across the team. These are the fuels of productivity which help the team grow continuously.

Imagine passionates who are highly motivated and engaged as a team, who contribute directly towards achieving your business goals by delivering exceptional digital products. What makes them do so? What are the secrets of great teams? 

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