How to conduct healthcheck?

Many companies experiment with trying to visualize what their team is doing. The main idea of such an event is to get a sense of what you need to focus your efforts on to improve, identify problems, and help teams become more productive.

Because guessing exactly what needs to be improved in work processes is difficult (you need to know what needs to be improved, and once improved, do you understand whether it really improves?), a systematic approach with visualization can help reduce that guesswork.

The engineers at Spotify have developed a technique over several years that helps address this issue. We, in turn, have accommodated this model in our bot service, allowing us to do healthchecks with remote employees and less time.

Terminology

Before we get started with the survey, let's define the terminology:

Healthcheck is the Squad Health Check itself, developed by Spotify engineers.

An indicator is a question that each participant has to answer. There are 10 in our template, you can create your own options, preferably no more than 12.

Semaphore - in our case it is a choice of three answer choices. Green - all is well, yellow - no change, red - we have problems.

Now let's define the indicators themselves, there are 10 in our template:

We recommend that each team break down which indicators make the most sense for them and based on the template, remove, add or change indicators.

Before you take the survey, talk through or describe each indicator in detail.

Below is a description of indicator in our template:

Healthcheck results should be sent to a common channel so the whole team can see the results.

Analyzing the data

Based on the results of the survey, we can identify 4 areas that need improvement: Problems in the team. Problems with technology. Problems with processes. Product problems.

For example, if the "teamwork" results show you are trending more into the red, then maybe the people on the team aren't getting along and something needs to change.

In your personal cabinet, analyze the responses, relative to previous Healthchecks. This way you can see the dynamics of change and whether you're moving in the right direction.

The summary

Try to make the team aware of the importance of healthcheck, do not be afraid to give red marks, this will show that the team realizes the problem.

Hold the healthcheck itself no more than once a month. After the survey, you can get the remote team together in a zoom and do a retrospective on the problem areas.