Ways of working series: Team health checks part 1

Author: Véronique Skelsey, Liqueo Ways of Working Agile Coach

A team is very like a human body. When the team is working together cohesively the general health of the team is good. When the constituent parts of the team are not working together, the health of the whole team suffers.

That’s why, like any human body, teams need regular health checks. Health checks are a simple way to help teams think about their current state and the ways they work. They help teams diagnose less healthy behaviours or environmental factors, and start a treatment programme for improvement.

Based on Liqueo’s expertise in team productivity and effectiveness, our Ways of Working practice (WoW) has prepared this simple guide to help you perform successful team Health Checks. Let’s get started.

What’s A Health Check?

The health check model we use with teams in Liqueo Ways of Working is based on Spotify’s Squad Health Check. It is framework-agnostic, so can be used by teams practising Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban or even Waterfall. It can easily be adapted to teams outside Technology disciplines (such as Trading, Marketing, Finance or HR) by tweaking the questions to reflect their working practices.

Why Do A Health Check? 

A health check aims to find out team members’ perspectives on:

• whether processes are fit for purpose

• whether the team has the tools and support they need

• whether they have clarity of purpose and feel fulfilled

Responses are visualised in a table that helps teams identify areas for improvement.

It’s very important that Health Checks are owned by the teams and used as a team tool. They aren’t intended to be used to assess or judge teams. They can, however, be useful for department heads to see where their teams need their support.

Health checks should be run on a regular basis, quarterly or at least bi-annually, in order to gain insight into trends.

Running A Health Check 

Health checks are best run in person with a team in a room. This ensures conversation flows smoothly so a facilitator can ensure participation from the whole team. (We’ll get to how to do this during lockdown in a minute…) These sessions are typically run with “traffic light” cards. The team members use these to vote on each of the topics. The votes are counted and the consensus for each topic is recorded.

The topics cover:

• Ease of code release

• Suitability of processes

• Tech quality

• Value delivery

• Speed of delivery

• Clarity of purpose

• Team autonomy

• Fun and fulfilment

• Continuous learning

• Support from the rest of the organisation

In our experience, it’s very simple to adapt and expand these topics, depending on your team’s specific processes and needs. For example, one client expanded “Tech quality” into these three questions:

• Health of codebase

• Recovery of technical debt

• Support of the system / Stability

These provide more granularity to the insights derived from the health check.

Tip: Download a printable version of the cards that the Spotify team uses. Simply edit them to suit your team’s needs.

What Do I Do With Health Check Results? 

Once you’ve captured the votes, look for patterns, inconsistencies, and changes against previous health checks. Draw insights into how your team is feeling. Are they overworked? Muddled on their purpose? Hampered by organizational policies or processes? Invite team members to engage with the findings. Then, post the results somewhere central for the team’s use. Once you’ve conducted several regular health checks, you can also create a chart showing how the traffic lights have changed over time.

Getting the best results from health checks 

Do not treat Health Checks as a singular event or hide the results away in the archives. Invite team members to review their trends and move toward positive change. Any insights gleaned from Health Checks should become topics for further exploration. You can do this in Retrospectives or in stand-alone sessions. Review each topic as a team, identify where problems lie, brainstorm solutions, suggest improvements, and define your next steps.

Now that you know the importance and benefits of Health Checks, you’re ready to begin implementing them into your organization. If you have any questions or need any help running a team Health Check, the Liqueo WoW Practice is available to help.