Probably many of your teams already went through some rough times, be it managers reorganizing teams, technical issues with product or anything disturbing that comes from either inside or outside the team.
When a team goes through such a time it’s vital for the team’s agile coach/scrum master to notice that there is a problem and even more important to be able to gather and analyze what the source of the problem is.
There are many signs in a team that potentially can show such a problem such as decrease in velocity, quality, morale, etc. but the problem is that these these metrics won’t necessarily or just later will change if you have a team of seasoned professionals.
I believe that the only way of detecting problematic issues is by getting your information right from the team.
Of course retrospectives bring out many issues that are probably short-term problems but many times long-term problems won’t show up in retrospectives.
So let’s help the team members to open up by making the question anonymous.
Focus on two areas
- How does the team doing currently? This can be easily measured by gathering NPS (Net Promoter Score)
- What would make the team member feel better or what could help him become more motivated and effective?
I used to measure these values by SurveyMonkey but my problem was that it was really hard presenting the change in the results and even match it up with the team’s velocity. NPS and team velocity many times go hand-in-hand with each other.
Recently I’ve started using Scrumile a tool that contains many-many great tools for Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters and what gives they have a solution for this scenario as well :)
gif from tenor.com
I think the Scrumile does a great job in gathering the needed info from the team painlessly. You just need to send out a link to your team members after every sprint. They open it up and give answers to 2 very simple questions. It really takes just 5 seconds to do.
After your team sent in their responses, you can check out the NPS score of the team grouped by your sprints next to the team’s velocity which is a very interesting pairing.
You can even manage the impediments your team collected over time.
Scrumile Team Statistics page
I hope you’ll find measuring team health will help you and your teams as well.
Phil T.