As a scrum team it’s important to want to keep improving how we work together and how we can get better at what we do, with this in mind we recently took a team health check.

What is a team health check?

The team health check gives the team an opportunity to ask 'How are we doing as team?' and 'How do we feel as a team?' – by regularly asking these questions it gives the team confidence that we are able to improve and make things better or if everything is awesome (green) then we can make sure we don’t move away from that good place by neglecting certain areas.

How does it work?

We picked 10 areas to look at as a team:

  • Innovation
  • Recruitment
  • Team
  • Collaboration
  • Communities
  • Training
  • Coaching
  • Delivery
  • Software Excellence
  • Operations

If you want to do this exercise with your team then you may decide to come up with other areas or not as many, the important thing is that you can decide what’s relevant for the team doing the health check.

We time boxed the session to 1 hour and carried it out as part of one of our allotted sprint retrospective timeslots.

Start by looking at 1 area and then using an example of what looks like awesome and an example of what looks like poor, we then voted to see if we were green (awesome), amber (somewhere between awesome and poor) or red (poor) for each of the areas, take the majority to assign your colour, so if you have 10 team members and 7 people vote green but 3 vote red then that area goes in the green pile. It is still important to capture the reasons why people have voted for red and also the number of people that voted. Over time the team should use these as an indication of whether the team is improving each time the session is run.

Once the voting was completed we looked at any of the areas that came out poor (red) and then had a discussion around why we felt we were red and what we could do as a team to improve and get better in this area. Remember to take actions from these discussions so the team has something to focus on when making changes and then they can measure success based on these actions.

If there are lots of areas that come out poor (red), it’s a good idea to focus on 1 or 2 areas to try and improve, this means things are more likely to happen as a result of the discussions as too many things to change can mean you lose focus on some of the tasks.

It's also worth noting that if the team come out as awesome (green) on all areas then spend some time discussing whether or not the team feel they are starting to slip in some areas and then talk about what can be done to make sure the team keeps in the awesome zone for each area going forward.

We plan to run these health check sessions once every quarter so as to not take up too much time from the team activities and also to allow some time for actions to be worked on before reviewing again.

Agile team health check