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, une entreprise de logiciels néerlandaise, a utilisé TeamRetro pour concevoir son propre modèle de bilan de santé en utilisant une série de dimensions spécifiques à ses valeurs, sa culture, ses objectifs d’équipe et ses exigences organisationnelles.
Sur la base de cet ensemble de critères, cette équipe de développeurs organisait initialement des réunions verbales au cours desquelles chaque personne répondait à leur modèle chaque semaine.
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. Ils ont ensuite utilisé l’API de TeamRetro pour construire leur propre API qui affichait les données de leur bilan de santé sur les écrans de télévision de leur bureau. 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?
Notre équipe effectue des bilans de santé parce que nous sommes une entreprise qui croit vraiment qu’il faut prendre soin de ses employés.
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?
Nous avons choisi de continuer avec un modèle que nous utilisions pour des points verbaux avant de commencer à utiliser TeamRetro.
Notre modèle de bilan de santé se compose des six facteurs suivants (traduit du néerlandais) :
Stress
Do you experience stress or busyness in your life?
Amusant
Do you have fun in what you do?
Impact
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?
Processus
Are the processes that should make everything run smooth working as intended, or do they get in your way?
Comment TeamRetro soutient-il tes bilans de santé ?
En utilisant les bilans de santé de TeamRetro pour organiser des réunions d’équipe hebdomadaires, les membres de l’équipe répondent systématiquement aux mêmes questions. This way they don’t accidentally forget or leave things out.
Utiliser TeamRetro signifie également que les membres de l’équipe peuvent noter leurs réflexions avant la réunion d’équipe hebdomadaire. 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.
Avec nos remerciements particuliers à Martijn Groeneveldt, développeur logiciel chez Infi, tu peux accéder à leur code pour le tableau de bord ici : Tableau de bord de santé TeamRetro.
Want to run your own health check? Here are a few models ready to go, or you can create your own.