Team process health check — a team process retrospective

Agile Coaches usually uses retrospectives to understand what happened in the last iteration and see what they can do different, others uses to feel the team mood — sometimes without actionable items. There are several ways to do retrospectives. Each one of them to fit their own purpose and to answer the questions the agile coach need at a given moment.
In this post, I'll show the way I use retrospectives to do a health check with the team, and understand what is happening with the process, the team goal, purpose and what can be improved so the team will work better and feel comfortable with the flow.
The Goal
For this health check, the main purpose is to understand the moment that the team is passing through, if there is something to improve, something that is pulling down the team capacity or velocity. The idea is not to see a sprint, or a iteration, but to see the whole process. If the team knows their purpose inside the company, and if they believe they're building something that will provide value to the customer. It's important to keep in mind an full organizational view, so the team must feel free to point things of the whole company that they believe that is causing impact into their flow — organizational changes or lack of communication for example.
Which questions I made?
What is the team goal or purpose inside the company?
The idea is to understand if the whole team is aligned with its purpose inside the company. If they know what they're doing to create value, or if the team have in mind if what they're building is leading to some goal, or they're just doing a backlog of work items with no clear goal.
In this topic, if the team suffered a scope change recently, you can divide the question in two different time slices. Like, "What was the team goal until <slice of time>?" and "What is the team goal now?".
What is helping the team to reach their goal or purpose?
If you already did some of the retrospectives of the Fun Retrospectives, you can consider here your engine, hot air, wind or something like that. Here, you will understand what the team is doing to go further, and pursuit their goal, what they believe that is leading them to accomplish it. But you must go beyond the team level, and give company wide examples to inspire them to think outside their group and see what is happening in the firm that is helping them. Other team made something that helped yours to understand the big picture of the problem for example? Someone's else story mapping give you more understanding about the company goal? It's important for the team to understand that they're part of a bigger thing.
What is causing the team to slow down their pace?
This question will help them to understand what is affecting their performance. You must keep in mind, and give them visibility that not everything that reduces pace is a bad thing. Vacations reduce team capacity, but vacation is not a bad thing. Holidays, are other examples. The way you do this question makes a HUGE difference. If you give a bad connotation to this point, it will be harder to people to feel comfortable to criticize some company events like hackathons, innovative fridays or other initiatives that not everyone likes to be part of, and sometimes managers force people to attend. With the right question, like the one bold above, people will feel free to say that something reduces their pace, without the feeling that they're being haters.
Also, people will feel free to point up organizational disfunctions that affect their work. Like constant organizational changes, lack of communication, lack of a clear purpose. I believe that this part of the session is the most important. So you can understand the team pains, and help them to discuss it later.
Which risks we’ll face in the future?
At this point, like the question shows, you will ask the team if they're seeing some risk for the next weeks or months. They must be looking the company wide problems, here you can check the team maturity with problems abroad the firm. Some points that may appear here are churn (customer and collaborators), organizational changes, lack of communication (yeah, again), lack of planning (not the scrum meeting). This question will give you information about the team view and concerns about the future.
Do we have some suggestions to the process?
And last, but not least. Suggestions for the process! This is an awesome question. Here you will see if people are comfortable to propose changes. It's obvious that you will not accept everything, but maybe there are actionable things that will help the team to perform better. This part I divided in 4 questions (there is a whole retrospective format that focus only in those four points).
- Do more: what we are doing that is working, and we must keep doing?
- Do less: what we are doing that is not working well, and we need to review? or things that are important to the process, but we do not need to do this way, a lot of meetings or pushed meetings for example.
- Start doing: what we are not doing, but we would like to try?
- Stop doing: what we are doing, but we must stop doing because we are not seeing any purpose, or we tried but it does not work in our context?
How to run the process?
Write down and explain
For each question, the team had 5 minutes to write down their points. After that they could discuss and explain what they wrote for 10 minutes. Here you must be focused on maintain the time box, since if all the points reach the maximum time it will take 1h15min. So be the clock control freak! It's your duty! Remember, this moment is just to people present what they wrote, give some explanation if it was not so clear into the post-it or the tool that you're using. You will not discuss how to fix anything at this moment. Here, you will group what is the same subject too.
Vote to discuss
Now it's time to discuss and provide action points for what was wrote. First, let's focus in the word ACTION. You will discuss a lot of things, but you must keep in mind that only ACTIONABLE points must be discussed. For example, if someone wrote "Our pace reduced 'cause Anakin left us". Ok, it's a point. But you have some control or something to do to solve it? No, right? So there's no need to discuss this. Let's focus on vote or discuss things that we can solve!
Right, now that we know that we must focus on actionable items you will provide 3 votes for each person. They can distribute it as they wish, one vote per item, 3 votes in the same item… It's up to them. After everyone dot voted, you will count the votes and provide 3 minutes of discussion for each vote. If a point got 5 votes, the team can discuss for 15 minutes (3 minutes * 5 votes) to reach a solution for that issue. Keep in mind that, at the end of the 15 minutes an action point must be acquired. They must reach a solution, or something that will help them to solve the point that they discussed. The action point must be reachable — they must know how to measure and understand if they accomplish the item, and they must set who is the responsible to solve it or to follow up it.
Now that the team discussed everything, it's up to you to help them to organize it and keep up if they're working in solve the problem.
Finishing the meeting
Well, now it's time to finish the meeting. It's a good moment to feel the team, and understand if they saw any value in this dynamic. I usually ask them to point up what is or are their key takeaways, like what they learned with all the discussions? And ask them to provide any feedback, telling me what could be different. Any feedback is valuable.
And what about you? Have you ever did a team retrospective, without focusing the sprint? How you did it?
