Sometimes messages are diluted as they get passed through a chain of people, and just like a watermelon, it can be green on the outside (like at your management meeting), and red on the inside (at the daily standup).
In business, it’s a bit more serious than at breakfast (and truth be told, if your watermelon is green on the inside you’ve got a problem). Without baselining the current reality, timely feedback loops and clear visualisation it’s not possible to succinctly articulate problems and make effective change.
We’ve created a series of exercises based on industry best practices to help you better articulate the true state of your team. By using a combination of quantitative, data-driven metrics, as well as qualitative insights, we provide your teams with a sense of their strengths and areas for improvement.
| Survey | Discovery Workshop | Replay Session |
The Survey
Our framework is designed to be operated at scale and draws on academic research, the latest advice from industry experts, and writing by industry acknowledged SMEs.
We start by understanding your team and their context. All the team members individually complete a questionnaire to help us orientate ourselves in the landscape of your teams, covering the following areas:
Team Culture
We explore patterns of response to the problems and opportunities that teams encounter. Recent studies have found that an organisational culture that is high-trust and emphasises information flow can predict high-performance software delivery and organisational performance.
Team Cohesion and Learning
Teams often focus their energy on delivery, or on new technologies, and neglect to work on how they interact with each other. Our questions help to understand the willingness for team mates to trust and be vulnerable with each other, to have candid honest debates, to commit and take accountability, and to strive to achieve team results over individual ego.
Employee Advocacy
This aspect of the questionnaire helps us understand the willingness for team members to go above and beyond, to help achieve goals, and actively promote your organisation.
Multi-team Software Delivery Assessment
- Team Health
By combining aspects of the Spotify Squad Health Check with elements from Google’s Project Aristotle we assess the health and confidence of the team as a delivery unit. - Flow
We asses the flow of work through the team and their awareness and performance regarding end-to-end delivery metrics. - Deployment
We work to understand the confidence and maturity of the team in the deployment practices of their software. - Testing and Testibility
We learn the approach your teams take with regards to the testing and testability of their software systems. - Operability
We highlight the awareness and practices of the team in relation to software operability, including readiness for production. - Continuous Delivery
We aim to understand the awareness and performance of the team regarding key continuous delivery practices.
Discovery Workshop
Using the questionnaire as a guide for a deep dive into particular areas, we meet with the team face to face. We run a team health check-in, a stakeholder mapping exercise, and a process workflow walkthrough highlighting any struggles, blockers, and achievements.
| See an example of a past workshop |
Replay Report
We combine all the data collected and play them back to you alongside any additional observations we may have from our workshop. Our findings are provided to the team in the form of a Replay Report with their survey data, a copy of their Discovery Session, and any next steps and recommendations that we think the team are empowered to start on their own. This report can also help them better articulate where they are right now and can use this to create an actionable plan for improving software, ways of working, and team culture.
If you have multiple teams going through the Insight process, the senior leadership will also have a 1.5 hr Department Replay Session where we will walk through themes we found across your teams with recommendations on what to do next.
| See an example of a Team Replay Report | Department Replay Report|
