Retrospective: Health Check Retro

Across the organisation I work with, we do a quarterly health check which is very much stolen from the excellent work Spotify did way back in 2014.

One of the problems our community of practice brought up was follow up by the teams themselves. We did this which gave the organisation this fantastic view of how we feel about the teams we work in but the teams never used the same information to improve. Odd right?

I was guilty of this and so I decided to have a retro to focus on improvements the team wanted to make before the next health check.

The setup for this retro was to get the team to vote on the areas which they wanted to see the most improvement in. This was a really quick dot voting exercise at the end of a stand up.

In the retro itself, these are the focus areas. We kick off by asking the team to list the problems they see in each of these areas. I like time boxes and gave them a whopping 7 minutes to pull these thoughts out into a flurry of post its.

I now pick on someone in the team to group the post it so we can see some themes. This is often the person who has used their phone the most or failing that a BA (since they usually have a knack for seeing some groups).

Next, we focus on just a few problem areas by dot voting. Getting them to list the problems means I can now complete the setup and ask them to find solutions for the problems we came up with, again giving them an aggressive time box to work to.

We now go through everything we have come up with, clarifying anything that is abstract (there are always a few) and asking some questions to get people thinking about what they are trying to solve:

How does this help solve the problem?
How is this related to the problem?
If you did this, what do you hope to fix?
Will this fix the whole problem?
What else might be have to do to fix the problem?

This bit is to clarify what everyone has come up with, which is important since we are going to ask people to own these.

The last part of this is the ask people to come up and choose 2 solutions. One that they put into practice this iteration and another one which is longer term. If people look like they lack enthusiasm, point out that the first people get to cherry pick the best things.... that usually helps.

They each read out what they chose for this iteration and talk about what they intend to do. We can keep on top of these in stand ups, asking what help we need to give to keep up the momentum.

Their homework is to think about how they will bring their other longer term task into action and what help they will need, which we will discuss in the next retro.