Key Terms: How to Collaborate as a Team Generated with AI assistance — review for accuracy and compare against your course materials. --- ACCOUNTABILITY Taking responsibility for completing assigned work on time and communicating proactively when something is at risk. In a team context, accountability is what each person owes to the rest of the group. BLOCKER A problem or dependency that is preventing progress on a task. Identifying and communicating blockers early — rather than waiting until a deadline — is a core professional habit in team environments. CONFLICT RESOLUTION The process of addressing disagreements or tensions within a team in a way that focuses on the problem rather than the people, and leads to a specific plan for moving forward. DAILY STANDUP A short, regular team check-in (typically 15 minutes or less) where each person answers three questions: what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, and what is blocking me. Common in Scrum workflows. DELEGATION Assigning a specific task to a specific person with a clear scope and deadline. Effective delegation is not just offloading work — it requires that the other person has the information and authority to complete the task. KANBAN BOARD A visual tool that organizes tasks into columns representing stages of work, commonly To Do, In Progress, and Done. Makes the current state of a project visible to everyone on the team without requiring a status meeting. RETROSPECTIVE A structured team reflection at the end of a project or sprint to identify what went well, what did not, and what to change in the next cycle. A retrospective is forward-looking — its purpose is to improve, not to assign blame. ROLE CLARITY A shared understanding of who is responsible for which parts of a project. Lack of role clarity is one of the most common reasons team projects fail — when no one owns a task, it often goes undone. SCRUM A specific implementation of Agile project management where work is organized into time-boxed sprints, with regular standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Widely used in professional software development teams. SHARED EXPECTATIONS Explicit agreements among team members about how the team will work — communication norms, response times, quality standards, and how decisions will be made. Teams that establish these early have fewer conflicts later. SPRINT A fixed-length period (typically one to four weeks) during which a team completes a defined set of tasks and delivers a working output. Sprints create rhythm and make progress visible at regular intervals. TASK OWNERSHIP The assignment of a task to one specific person who is responsible for completing it. Shared ownership of a task often means no one feels individually responsible for it. TEAM CHARTER A written document establishing how a team will work together: roles, communication methods, decision-making processes, and how conflicts will be handled. Useful for both class projects and professional teams. WORKING AGREEMENT Similar to a team charter, a working agreement is a set of norms the team commits to — for example, responding to messages within 24 hours or flagging blockers at least two days before a deadline.