Has anyone used the Team Health Monitors introduced fall 2016? (And the Team Playbook?)

[Ron Lichty]

Tell us your experience using Team Health Monitors and the Team Playbook?

[Ethan Foulkes]

Hi Ron,

We were fortunate to have Dominic Price come and run a couple of health monitors for us a little while back and the experience was great. I think Atlassian has done a great job codifying these things so that they are easy to understand and execute. I don't think my teams knew quite what to expect going in but they all got involved and energy was great!

We are planning to run the follow-up plays on our own next week and then eventually do another round of monitors on our own. I'll report back on those experiences later. Interested to hear what you or others say!

[Ethan Foulkes]

Follow up on this. We broke the group into 2 teams and ran The 5 Why's exercise. Both sessions had very similar discussions with the same core problem chosen and similar root cause identified. Process flowed easily and rubber chicken was a hit! =)

[SGD]

Ethan, great to hear! I'd love to pull a quote (maybe paraphrased slightly) from this to include in an email we're sending out to the Team Playbook user community later this month. Could you ping me at sgoffdupont@atlassian.com with your company name and job title, please?

[georgia wright]

We were super lucky to have Dom run the Atlassian Health Check with our Global People Experience Program team at Xero! 

We found it a really valuable process to go through as a team and the style and approach of the session suited our people and culture - it's very relaxed, open, simple but super insightful and engaging. It helped us raise the important questions, provided enormous clarity on areas we were just ignoring, and pinpoint where we need to invest more time so that we ensure we are operating as a high performing team.

Having a skilled skilled facilitator like Dom to run the session, in particular navigate some of the more difficult conversations that arose, was particularly helpful. He sets a high bar so for us to run these internally at Xero we'll need to channel his prowess! 

[Chris G]

I've seen that the Playbook is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. So the first question is:

Q1: Are you guy working for None profit organisations?

And the second question is:

Q2: If not, are you paying anything to Atlassian to incorporate the Team Playbook within your business?

It's really vague as to what breaches the licence and I need to make sure using the Team Playbook to improve our teams dynamics won't breach any licences.

[Bernie Ferguson]

Hi Chris,

Bernard here from the Atlassian Team Playbook team (I'm the full time owner of the Team Playbook).

The Team Playbook is licensed under Creative Comms as you mention so you are free to share and adapt as long as you attribute Atlassian and if you build on and share you do so under the same creative comms license.

It's free as we deeply care about teams and our mission at Atlassian is to unleash the potential in every team. 

Creative Comms details are here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Using the Team Playbook to improve your team's dynamics is exactly why we open sourced and published the Team Playbook.

The only request we have is that you give us feedback. Use the "Give Feedback" form on the site to send over your feedback. We can't improve without your feedback.

Cheers,
Bernard

[Hazmee ming]

Yes, but please give me a chance next time.

[Dave]

I plan to share with my team though I haven't yet.  I know that over 600 teams have put into practice, so I'll try to find out their experiences to share.

[Dave]

I found one Atlassian tools user (Boriana Todorova) and will loop her into this conversation

[Dave]

I believe Ron is looking for more examples and this might be more of a discussion thread than one solution to the question.

[Boriana Todorova (Sofia, ACE)]

Hi Ron, we have done the health check for almost a year. It has been very useful with the Team Playbook. 

We have done few plays but they brought dramatic change in the team: changing tools for project management, creating brand new wiki space, etc.

The best was that the team owns the change and is very motivated in driving the changes.

What I notice is that sometimes the project team lead is seeing the Team Health as an evaluation for his work and that it might take some convincing. The good part is that after the first health check everybody is happy J

I am not sure how often should a team do the Health Monitor. We try to do it once a month but it does not always make sense.…?

[Dave]

Thanks Boriana!  I hope to see you again at Summit in San Jose

[Bernie Ferguson]

Hi Boriana, we find that teams will tend to run a Health Monitor each month or for some teams it replaces every second retrospective. A scrum team for example would run a sprint/retro then sprint/health monitor. Then repeat.

If that makes sense?

Leadership teams tend to run the Heath Monitor less frequently, usually quarterly.

But there's no set rule to what cadence you should follow, really that comes back to the team and making sure you are using the Health Monitor to drive your performance and become healthier.

I hope that helps?

[Ron Lichty]

You may find useful: Henrik Kniberg discusses frequency of using his (earlier) team health model/assessment process at https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/16/squad-health-check-model/

[Boriana Todorova (Sofia, ACE)]

Thanks Bernard! The idea of replacing a retro with Health Monitor is great. Will try that :) 

[Dominic Price]

For anyone wanting more info, there is a webinar explaining more and some tips of how to get started;

https://www.atlassian.com/webinars/software/team-playbook-more-guidance-less-process

[Ron Lichty]

Awesome, Dominic. Thank you! Will check it out.

[Ra Acosta]

We had the chance to use them last year with a couple of teams, it was a great experience. The guys came pretty critical to their health and most of the times these games make a good play on the conscious of the team, so changes kind of flow naturally. Another thing to consider is the organisation's culture, if there isn't an agile mindset and the empowerment the team needs and deserves to reach their goals, changes on team's health are not fast enough.

Anyway, every agile coach should use it and try to integrate on the flexibility and capabilities the Atlassian products have.

[Dominic Price]

Thanks for sharing your experience and ideas. Very much appreciated. I also agree that you need a culture around openness and willingness to share the good and the bad, to actually make the right progress on this.