Comprehensive Team Health Check

Would you like to get a feel for what the team thinks of many aspects of the team processes in less than 15 minutes? What does the team really think of your work?

I work with a distributed team. We conduct weekly 30 minute retrospectives on a variety of topics and from time to time we will do an ad hoc retrospective right after our stand up. The ad hoc retrospectives are typically in response to an insight or problem we think we can act on right away. The frequent, short retrospectives help us to improve using small increments but have a narrow focus. I try to do a comprehensive health check at least once a year. Recently we had the entire team in one location. We decided to grab the opportunity to dedicate a full day to review the team and processes in person.

The heat map at the top is an example and not identical to the results for our team

Team Lead and Project Manager Review

Our team is very open and we will call it as it is. However, I was curious to see whether we would get new information if we removed the team lead and project manager from the discussion. I invited a trusted facilitator from outside the team to review the team lead and project manager’s performance in a meeting in their absence. We used a simple approach: The team first listed all the PM responsibilities and activities and then rated them as good or bad After the meeting we joined the team to discuss opportunities to improve. We did the same for the team lead.

Below is a selection of the comments from the team on the PM. I kind of like the PITA comment

Do you think your team would benefit from these  kind of tools?

The opinions represented in this blog are my own, and not that of my employer or the  organizations that I work with.