A happy and healthy agile team can impact their ability to deliver high-quality software and meet customer needs. The question of course is how do you know if your team is happy? How do you keep on top of this and how can you track team happiness over time?
An agile team health check can be a simple tool that lets you pick the key dimensions (or criteria) of health that matters most to the organization. Spotify, Atlassain, Google are just some of the companies that share their health check models and help to popularize this concept.
Infi, ein niederländisches Softwareunternehmen, nutzte TeamRetro, um ein eigenes Health-Check-Modell zu entwickeln, das verschiedene Dimensionen verwendet, die auf ihre Werte, Kultur, Teamziele und organisatorischen Anforderungen zugeschnitten sind.
Basierend auf diesen Kriterien führte dieses Entwicklerteam zunächst mündliche Meetings durch, in denen jede Person wöchentlich auf ihr Modell reagierte.
However, this can be hard to track efficiently so they went to the next level. Capturing this information with an agile team health check tool meant that they could capture that data quickly. Anschließend nutzten sie die API von TeamRetro, um eine eigene API zu erstellen, die ihre Health-Check-Daten auf den Bildschirmen im Büro anzeigte. This meant that the data was always visible and highlighted the organization’s commitment to supporting happy, productive teams.
Here, Software Developer Martijn Groeneveldt, shares their story… and their link to Github so you can try out the dashboard for yourself.
Why does your software development team use health checks?
Unser Team führt Health Checks durch, weil wir ein Unternehmen sind, das wirklich an die Fürsorge für seine Mitarbeiter glaubt.
We believe that in the software development and consultancy business, human factors can make the difference between ‘okay’ and ‘awesome’. That’s why we run weekly check-ins. They are a good way to check whether there are things we can do, or do differently, so individuals are able to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
What health check dimensions did you use to measure team happiness?
Wir haben uns entschieden, mit einem Modell weiterzumachen, das wir für mündliche Check-ins verwendet haben, bevor wir TeamRetro nutzten.
Unser Health-Check-Modell besteht aus den folgenden sechs Faktoren – (übersetzt aus dem Niederländischen)
Stress
Do you experience stress or busyness in your life?
Spaß
Do you have fun in what you do?
Auswirkungen
Do you have the feeling that you’re making an impact for the client or Infi?
Colleagues
How does the collaboration with colleagues and clients go?
Technology
Is the technology you are working with (still) fun and interesting?
Verfahren
Are the processes that should make everything run smooth working as intended, or do they get in your way?
Wie unterstützt TeamRetro deine Health Checks?
Durch die Nutzung der TeamRetro Health Checks für wöchentliche Teammeetings reagieren Teammitglieder konsistent auf dieselben Fragen. This way they don’t accidentally forget or leave things out.
Die Nutzung von TeamRetro bedeutet auch, dass Teammitglieder ihre Gedanken vor dem wöchentlichen Teammeeting aufschreiben können. We also can produce a nice statistics graph of all health checks done the previous periods.
We then display this on our screens so that our team can see it as needed.
(Example as shown – data is for illustrative purposes only and is not reflective of Infi)
What are the benefits of making your agile metrics visible?
Having the data visible means you also have the ability to make better decisions, reduce decision latency and ensure that any issues are addressed as soon as possible. This suggests that transparency is crucial to agile.
Whilst most teams can focus on the quantitative aspect of burn down charts, velocity points and error rates, having your team’s health check clear and upfront is a great way to put people in the picture too.
Mit besonderem Dank an Martijn Groeneveldt, Softwareentwickler bei Infi, kannst du hier auf den Code für das Dashboard zugreifen: TeamRetro Health Dashboard.
Want to run your own health check? Here are a few models ready to go, or you can create your own.