The Scrum Health Check gives each person the chance to openly and honestly share their perspective on a range of health dimensions from Product Ownership through to Tooling.
This gives the Scrum Master a high level overview of the health of the team and how it might be impacting happiness and productivity, over a period of time. Running a Scrum Health Check regularly gives the team the option to voice any concerns and for the leadership to address any issues before they escalate.
Scrum Health Check dimensions
The Scrum Health Check model uses a set of common dimensions that teams can use to evaluate and discover the current health of the team. Use these as standard or create your own set of dimensions to track. Each team member is asked to rate how closely they agree with a statement relating to each dimension.
This highlights areas of excellence as well as areas where the team might require additional support.
Product Ownership
The current state of the product backlog, user stories, acceptance criteria and its relevance to the business.
Team Work
The current state of collaboration, communication, participation and the ability of the team to own the process and overcome impediments.
Events
The cadence and effectiveness of the meetings include stand-ups, planning, reviews, retrospectives, and refining.
Product and Technical Debt
The burn rate, the definition of done, the value of increments and the level of technical debt.
Tooling
The ability to use agile tools and to automate testing.
Add your own
Add your own Scrum Health Check Dimension that makes sense for your team.
How to create a Health Check in TeamRetro
Your template is ready to go
Under Health Checks, select the health check you’d like to complete. Decide if you want to survey the team anonymously, using aliases or openly.
Reveal and discuss the results
Your health check data is displayed showing the average response and tally of each response. Sort dimensions by most positive, negative or mixed responses to make discussions more meaningful.
Keep conversation on track with Presentation Mode
Switch to presentation mode to sync devices making it easier to facilitate and focus conversations. Capture comments and actions along the way.
Review your action plan
Assign action owners and set due dates for new items and review prior actions. This action list can be tracked, shared or integrated into your other workflow tools.
Share the results
Great work, you are all done! Share the results with your team via email, download and print or publish to tools like Jira, Asana and Trello. Results can be tracked in your dashboard.
Tips for running an effective Scrum Health Check
- Share and discuss the health dimensions as part of your first health check meeting. Making sure the team understands the premise for each one will go a long way to helping them provide more accurate responses.
- During the survey, people should be quickly, silently and independently sharing their ideas. This is not the time to try and solve the problem.
- Celebrate the successes first. Based on the results, acknowledge the team for the aspects of Scrum that they feel are going well and have rated highly on. This gives them them a great starting point to work on areas of success and to use that as a platform for further discussion.
- As the Scrum Health Check might be at a high level, it may be worth running a more specific health check that might allows you to gather more insight and data into a particular aspect. For example, if Scrum Events have rated low, then running a Scrum Ceremonies Health check might pinpoint the actual events that are of concern. Similarly, if team work is the issue, then looking more deeply at psychological safety may reveal new insights that allow you to cultivate a good team culture.
- Walk away with action points. Have the team come up with key action points that will help them with continuously improving the way they work with Scrum.
- Don’t forget, you can always create your own custom health check to track based on the dynamics and feedback of the team.