Description of the workshop

The Squad Health Check is a workshop designed to gather team members' opinions about their production and organization in a visual and summarized way. It was first introduced by Henrik Kniberg, an Agile Coach at Spotify, in 2014 in an article titled "Squad Health Check model – visualizing what to improve."

Each team member is to express themselves based on 11 criteria, outlined on cards with good and bad examples:

  1. Delivering Value;
  2. Speed;
  3. Easy to release;
  4. Health of Codebase;
  5. Mission;
  6. Support;
  7. Suitable Process;
  8. Teamwork;
  9. Pawns or Players;
  10. Learning;
  11. Fun.

The colored dots summarize opinions with a 3-level evaluation scale.

  • Green does not necessarily mean that the situation is perfect but that the team is satisfied with the current situation and does not consider that it requires improvement at the moment;
  • Yellow denotes the presence of significant problems that must be addressed but that there is no emergency situation;
  • Red indicates the presence of problems that must be addressed urgently because they endanger the functioning of the team or the product.

This workshop will help your team comprehensively analyze your organization's performance while having fun. It aims to raise awareness of the problems that need attention in order to improve the functioning of your team. Additionally, as part of a large-scale Agility project, you can conduct these workshops with multiple teams simultaneously to create an overall understanding of the program's health.

How to run the Squad Health Check

The first two steps are to collect the data. Steps 3 and 4 are not part of the Squad Health Check workshop as such, but are commonly used in retrospective workshops to propose and select improvement actions; they can be carried out in addition.

Step 1: Presentation of the 11 workshop criteria

The facilitator introduces the workshop's objective and presents each of the 11 criteria.

Step 2: Evaluation of the criteria

The facilitator begins by reading the two examples attached to each criterion before collecting opinions. This step is crucial in helping the participants understand the scale of values. 

The votes can be collected by either letting each team member place a dot of the color of their choice or through dot voting on the three pre-arranged dots. In all cases, the final decision regarding the dot must be made through discussion between team members to create alignment on the diagnosis. 

Participants are also encouraged to express their views on the trend for each criterion, whether it's stable, improving, or getting worse. This can be done either through discussion or by dot voting.

Step 3: Proposal for improvement actions

Participants propose improvement actions for each criterion. The best idea is chosen through dot voting.

Step 4: Selection of improvement actions

In the previous step, 11 proposals were preselected. The three most relevant improvement actions are chosen through a vote. Each person can grant up to 3 votes, but only one vote can be given per proposal. This will help collect more data for later sorting of the proposals.