Evaluating Team Health in Agile and DevOps

There are several well-known metrics used to measure customer satisfaction. One is the Net Promoter Score , which measures if users would recommend the software to others, do nothing, or recommend against it. Using a consistent customer satisfaction metric and measuring it for every release indicates whether the scrum team is meeting its end goal—to provide value to customers.

You may think that great and wonderful action items are drawn from these meetings that change everything. However, what we have found to be the most successful piece of them is simply giving the teams room to breathe, to talk with each other, and to ask questions. We have seen more positive feedback around comments like “It was great to sit together as a team and talk about these things” than from any individual action item generated by the health checks.

From that point onward we ran them twice a year, with there even being occasional questions as to ‘so when are we running the next one? Culture is a Team Sport is our sub-series on Coding in the Crease to talk about culture, processes and policy at SportsEngine. We’ll focus on what we are doing to create a generative culture where our employees are able to learn and grow. In this article, we share how team health checks have helped us deal with the human side of teamwork and high-level issues.

Upcoming Agile Team Health Check Training

These range from “health of codebase” to “teamwork” and “fun.” Team members give each dimension a rating of green, yellow, or red. The results are captured on a whiteboard and used to guide discussions around how the team can improve next quarter. During the process I’m also taking notes, writing down action item ideas, and tallying the voting. At the end of our time together, the last step is to discuss findings and create action items with specific owners. I try to encourage them to continue certain conversations throughout the next quarter, and to act on issues they feel strongly about.

The health check process involves identifying around 10 questions or themes for the team to discuss and capturing their sentiment about each theme. The theme “can we release easily?” might elicit responses of “our releases are awesome/meh/crappy” i.e. green, amber and red, the colours of a traffic light. Compared to the academic tradition the Agile movement is the new kid on the block. It has an image of being more modern and more relaxed and therefore feels younger.

Spotify Team Health Check

However, a specific set of skills and traits make people fit into this kind of team. For example, cooperation and empathy are always more important than ambition and competitiveness, as Agile supports working together rather than against each other. Also, people with the ability to adapt to sudden changes and focus on learning more will quickly find their place within the Agile team. The first one is less flexible but consists of experts in their fields, while the second one may need more time to work on a product but are much more adaptable to changes.

At the same time, employees should have the autonomy to determine how they do their work. While mobbing and pairing might be effective in one situation, tackling the problem individually might work best in another. The important thing is that your team is empowered to collaborate when https://globalcloudteam.com/ it serves the project. Enjoyment will always fluctuate due to myriad factors, both personal and work-related. But if the team is relatively happy (3-5) a lot of the time, you know you’re in a good place. Frequent ratings of 1-2 should prompt deeper examination of employee experience.

Scrum Reporting—Which Metrics to Report to Stakeholders?

The people being judged can’t then help but try to put a tick in every box. Judgement placed upon them replaces the judgement exercised by them and they become box-tickers. Gather data primarily throughFace-to-facecommunication, not online surveys.

Everyone understands why they are here, supports the idea and believe they have what it takes to create solutions that add value. Hi Andy, thanks for this roles in software development team round up, I’ve found it useful on more than one occasion. Just wanted to let you know that the Comparative Agility tool is not free , it’s $500 per team.

For a team of eight or fewer people, the session lasts one to two hours. Here are a couple of suggested usage models you can consider along the way of your agile improvement journey. I’ll use the AgileSparks Way language so here it is for reference. Like a physical, team health monitors are meant to be preventative.

Response Time Matters

Where there’s dissension, we always downgrade to yellow or red and say that there’s some things that we can work on to get everybody on the same page.” Note that this is aself-assessment model, all based on the honesty and subjective opinions of the people in the squads. So it only works in a high-trust environment, where people trust their managers and colleagues to act in their best interest. The data is easy to game, so the key is to make sure there is no incentive to do so. To see how it all played out, let’s take a closer look at the New Relic Browser team.

• Following are some models to explore and experiment with.
• It’s certainly not intended to be exhaustive and is designed to be simple, but it will give you an opening to explore challenges your team may be facing.
• For the checkpoint, pull up your Health Monitor grid.
• Share and discuss the health dimensions as part of your first health check meeting.
• And they create a space for teams to share broad perspectives on how they’re feeling about all aspects of their work environment.

Sprint planning—A meeting at the start of a sprint where high-level story descriptions are broken down into detailed tasks. Provides a detailed estimate for the scope of work that can be produced during the sprint. Read the definitions of Awesome and Crappy to give everyone a shared understanding of what the area represents. For years now I’ve been trying to go beyond practice-level assessments. Ask teams who’s accountable for various parts of a project. We’ve found that online surveys suck for this type of thing.

Putting Health Monitors In Action

A model like this CAN help boost and focus your improvement efforts. But it can also totally screw up your culture if used inappropriately! We make sure the questions are about the environment in which the squad operates, and not about hard output . That makes the survey less threatening, and reinforces the notion that the survey is about support and improvement, not judgement. Every squad is having fun (and it’s even improving)!

Our so-called mission is completely unclear and uninspiring.FunWe love going to work, and have great fun working togetherBoooooooring.LearningWe’re learning lots of interesting stuff all the time! We never have time to learn anythingSupportWe always get great support & help when we ask for it! We keep getting stuck because we can’t get the support & help that we ask for.Pawns or playersWe are in control of our destiny! Teams can do health assessments to explore and discuss their team’s health and happiness. According to Gwenno Haf Hughes, it’s good to let teams create their own health check, understanding what healthy looks like for the team in question.

How we do this at Spotify

Key operations will be enhanced and adjusted to the requirements of integrations with 3rd party tools, and inline task editing will be available directly on the app screens. We intend to focus more on Objectives & Key Results . Users will soon be able to align the objectives with scheduled works to drive execution. Furthermore, key results of the objectives could be tracked and measured.

They can choose to give one item 5 votes, or give two votes on one item, two votes on another, and 1 vote on another. Once all votes are cast, the items with the highest votes are further discussed and the team will decide on detailed plans. As the leader, it is your job to make sure the team comes to an agreed upon decision. Value – Our stakeholders are happy with what we deliver and it provides value to them. Ownership – We have a dedicated product owner or business partner who is accountable for our results. Based on these results, the team needs to have an open discussion and figure out where they can improve.

By tracking your own “employee health” alongside team health, you can begin to identify variables in your life – which your manager may or may not know about – that help you to be happier at work. The PETALS model is designed to capture feedback on a weekly basis using tools that are already part of your workflow. As an example, my teams currently use Microsoft Forms and Excel.

Related articles

As a result, every request to the API health check endpoint returns the most up-to-date status of your microservice. Pairing this metric with individual performance goals is a scary thing. I’m glad to hear your leadership and HR are open to other ideas that may be more appropriate…

Whether you are in-person or remote, there will always be engineers who are more inclined to voice their opinions than others. While fluctuations in stress are normal, pay attention to sudden changes. Let’s say you’ve had weeks of green, and a team member’s stress petal suddenly turns red.

Perhaps there is an obvious cause, such as a team member struggling with a particular piece of work. In that case, you can talk with them about providing extra support or just keep an eye on it in the coming weeks. There are several ways to increase the learning on your team.