U.S. journalist and author Prentice Mulford once said:
""He who recognizes an evil has almost cured it.". "
Prentice Mulford
Therefore, it's no wonder that we take our temperature, visit the doctor, or Google symptoms when our bodies aren't feeling up to it. That's exactly what business management does: it has developed KPIs with which it can measure and visualize how healthy its teams and projects are. This way, it can react quickly to errors and correct them.
The problem is that with traditional KPIs, you can't measure anything until something has already gone wrong. However, health and well-being are so important - for both our bodies and minds as well as for teams and projects. Thus, we should take precautions to avoid getting sick in the first place, right?
Well, in business management, that's exactly what an Agility Health Radar is for. We'll explain what an Agility Health Radar is, what models and tools are on the market for it, how they help you keep your organization healthy and vibrant - and which agility health radar questions may help you start your own.
What is an Agility Health Radar Assessment?
An Agility Health Radar - or Agility Health Team Radar - is a tool that allows you to measure and visualize the health and morale of your team. In doing so, the Agility Health Radar tool uses questions to uncover the status quo as well as important developments and changes. As a result, teams will be able to take control of their own development. The results are as follows: they...
- are more motivated
- are willing to go the extra mile,
- are enthusiastic about the purpose of their work, and
- are more engaged in helping their colleagues.
This also allows them to complete a project more efficiently - with better results. You, as a Servant Leader, learn how to support your teams where they really need it via an Agility Health Radar Assessment.
Before we go any deeper, a quick note. We will soon hold a free webinar on the topic of "the best agile metrics" – with 11 international experts as our guests! You can find more information about it in the teaser video below.
If that sounds interesting, check out the Project Scagile website for more information - you can also register there (see red button above).
What an Agility Health Radar Assessment is not
A Business Agility Health Radar is not a tool to evaluate or assess performance nor is it incentive model to drive employee performance. This is because it is always subjective. If Team A rates certain areas of work as "good," but Team B rates the same areas as "poor," this does not need to have to do with the actual status quo.
There are many aspects that have a critical impact on how teams rate Agility Health Radar issues, including employee circumstances, attitudes, and perceptions. Therefore, a Team Health Radar should only ever be an internal tool to evaluate the well-being of your employees and how they relate to the project.
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Fill out our agile maturity assessment for your agile transformation – it only takes 3 minutes! You will even get a benchmark based on the more than 300 participants we already have. Have fun 🙂
Agility Health Radar Assessments - an overview
It is sure to say that you will find dozens of Agility Health Radar assessments on the market. However, we would like to briefly introduce the 13 most popular of them to you here in an overview - and also critically question them - providing you with a first impression of which model might be suitable for your team and your organization.
One thing in advance: In this article, we have investigated the question of which is the best agile metric of all and have found surprising results to follow.
1. LEAN AGILE INTELLIGENCE
The Lean Agile Intelligence Agile Health Check is a metric that organizations can adapt to their needs to drive organic and systematic improvements in teams and organizations. In its structure and design, it carries elements of the Spotify Health Check and the Comparative Agility Survey (see below), among others. The model uses questions and theses around behaviors, interactions, values, and motivations.
2. AGILOMETER
Agilometer works with 6 key areas where employees assign scores between 1 (poor) and 5 (perfect). The key areas are divided into flexibility (in terms of what is delivered), collaboration, ease of communication, ability to work iteratively and deliver incrementally, beneficial environmental conditions, and acceptance of Agile. Organizations can use Agilometer to assess how ready their project environment is to adopt Agile delivery methods.
3. AGILE FLUENCY MODEL
Fluency describes a routine and deliberate practice that results in "mastery" that persists under stress. The Agile Fluency Model is designed to help teams determine which level of fluency best fits their organization's needs. Named "Agile Fluency Diagnostics," they help them assess themselves and answer the question, "Where are we?" - Facilitators can then help chart a course that will continuously improve the team.
4. GALLUP Q12
Gallup is a U.S. opinion research institute that has been conducting surveys on various topics since the 1930s. Today, the company is best known in Germany for its studies on employee satisfaction and employee motivation. Over the years, Gallup has developed 12 health questions - or rather theses - that employees rate on a scale of one ("disagree") to five ("agree completely"). Gallup Q12 covers important areas such as appreciation, further development, and relationships with superiors and colleagues. The important factor here is that the focus is not on agility, but rather on psychological well-being.
5. SPOTIFY HEALTH CHECK
The Spotify Health Check is a workshop in which teams take a retrospective look back at the work they have done so far. The model was invented by the Swedish audio streaming service Spotify. Employees use a traffic light system (red, yellow and green) to rate how they assess 11 different dimensions of their work.
These include value generation, learning, fun, mission and speed. If you are interested to learn in detail how the Spotify Health Check works and what you need to keep in mind, feel free to check out our detailed guide "Spotify Health Check – Everything You Need to Know" right now.
If you are interested in how to talk about the results of a Spotify Health Check in a meaningful way (and to generate high-quality action items), take a look at our post on the Spotify Health Check Retrospective.
6. eNPS
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is actually a metric that companies can use to assess customer satisfaction and thus the customer benefits delivered (aka "value") or their success. Customers are given simple, standardized surveys to gather feedback from. From this data, companies can calculate a comparable measurement value.
The KPI can also be used as a business health radar. The eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) uses factors such as trust, personal responsibility and handling ambiguity to evaluate the status quo of teams. The final metric then reveals how likely they would be to recommend their employer to others - a good baseline indicator in the area of corporate culture. For more on how to measure the different key foci in an agile transformation, read this blog post.
7. COMPARATIVE AGILITY SURVEY
The Comparative Agility Survey is an Agility Health Radar Assessment that companies can use to further develop their organization and their employees. To do this, they compare their agile way of working with that of others.
This way, they gain important insights and can improve their own approach. In this context, the "Personal Improvement" module is suitable as a resource for employees to receive individual recommendations and to be able to hold confidential discussions with colleagues.
It is, however, noted as a critic if the comparison made here is at all meaningful and purposeful.
8. NÖJD CRISPARE INDEX
The Nöjd Crispare Index is a happiness indexfrom the Crisp company. Here, the Health Radar questions place a focus on employee well-being, rather than "agility." They can rate the questions on a scale from 1 ("Really big bummer") to 5 ("I'm super happy").
With just three questions, the model takes on a minimalist approach. Yet, agile coaches etc. can optionally include additional questions that go into more detail.
9. PROJECT APPROACH QUESTIONNAIRE
The Project Approach Questionnaire (PAQ) is an Agility Health Radar Survey that uses 17 theses. Employees rate these with the categories "strongly agree," "agree," "neutral," "disagree," and "disagree at all." Especially in the case of negative assessments, they can optionally add a comment to explain their evaluation.
The Project Approach Questionnaire refers to the risks that can cause problems when executing projects with the agile approach "Dynamic Systems Development Method" (DSDM).
10. TEAM BAROMETER
The Scaled Agile Framework Team barometer is a survey conducted during a workshop. It consists of 16 team characteristics, such as trust, feedback, collaboration and pride. For each topic, employees can show a green, yellow or red card to give their assessment. At the end, the team discusses the results. It has a very similar approach to that of the Spotify Health Check.
11. TEAM MORALE METRICS
Team Morale Metrics is a survey tool that agile teams can use to develop themselves. It collects assessments around team morale. Companies can then interpret the results using benchmarks. This Agility Health Radar is based on the "Utrecht Work Engagement Scale", a psychometrically validated metric for assessing work and well-being. As a psychologist, I must positively emphasize the validity of this model.
12. AGILITY HEALTH RADAR
The Agility Health Radar uses online forms to assess the dimensions of "performance," "agile leadership," "agile culture," "core values," and "clarity in teams." In order to gather the data, employees fill out online forms. The company behind the tool, Agility Health, then automatically evaluates the answers given and makes the results available in a PDF. Companies should be able to use the tool primarily to uncover potential in teams.
13. ECHOMETER
Last but not least, we would also like to introducethe Agility Health Radar of Echometer which takes into account common criticisms of the models mentioned above. You can find more information on this after I have explained how professional agilists critisize these classical agility health radars.
By the way, if you are still looking for a suitable retro board (with 60+ agile retrospective formats), this post can help you: Comparing the 6 best retrospective boards
Most Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters run in circles...
...fixing superficial symptoms. Time to use psychology to foster sustainable mindset change.
Common criticisms of Agility Health Radars
- One common criticism of Agility Health Radars is the size of the questionnaires. In some cases, 20 to 40 questions are asked on a quarterly basis. This leads to displeasure, especially on the employee side. Unfortunately, experience has shown that there is a great deal of "survey fatigue" among employees. This is often due to the fact that...
- The results of surveys or agility health radars are not shared with employees - or are shared on a very delayed basis. "Transparency" as an agile value is disregarded and management quietly comes up with action items based on the results.
The right way here would (of course) be to involve the teams early and transparently in the derivation of measures based on the health check. For example, also within agile retrospectives - as Echometer does. More to be covered on this below. - Scientific criteria such as objectivity, reliability and validity of the measurement models are often not met from my psychological perspective. E.g., the Spotify Health Check or the Team Barometer are models that laymen (referring to the discipline of psychometrics) "made up". In this respect, their practical usefulness must also be questioned. This is another area in which we have placed great emphasis at Echometer.
Echometer is a software tool' that combines Agility Health Checks and Retrospectives. Validated KPIs can be defined both at management level (e.g., the Agile Center of Excellence) and individually at team level (e.g., Scrum Master), which are regularly measured in small pulse surveys - and can be integrated into retrospectives in an interactive and varied way with the help of Echometer.
On the one hand, this results in important discussions in retrospectives and appropriate action items, bottom-up. On the other hand, there is more transparency at management level with regard to corporate development.
A simple example of corresponding health check retros could be the measurement of agile values, which can then be made measurable across teams. You can simply open such a retro here without logging in and try it out with an agile team:
Note: This retrospective format asks for agreement with the given Health Check items on a scale.
- Courage: We value people showing courage.
- Respect: We value each other’s ideas, even when disagreeing.
- Commitment: Every team member is committed to follow through on what they have promised.
- Focus: We don’t allow ourselves to be distracted from reaching the sprint goal.
- Openness: We are open to constructive feedback and grow from it.
Here you can see one of the many visualizations in the Echometer tool that are visible at the team and organization level.
Agility Health Radar Questions
With these 13 models, you already have a good overview of how an Agility Health Radar can help you put the health of your team through its paces.
However, some of the models sound very abstract, making it hard for you to understand what questions and content they actually work with in practice. To give you an idea of what Agility Health Radar questions might look like, we've put together 4 categories with 2 questions each as examples.
You can find an example above in the retro on agile values. Another example would be our "Team Morale Health Check" – feel free to try it out:
Note: This retrospective format asks for agreement with the given Health Check items on a scale.
- Appreciation: My colleagues appreciate my contribution to the team.
- Team Spirit: There is a trusting working atmosphere in our team.
- Transparency: Everyone in my team knows who is currently working on what.
- Recovery & Breaks: I have enough room for breaks in which I can draw new energy.
- Meeting culture: Our meetings are well structured, yet leave room for creativity and new ideas.
- Support: In my team, each team member passes on their individual knowledge and experience.
Good questions are usually enough to get an effective start to an Agile Health Check. Because: An Agility Health Radar is not about asking as many different questions as possible. It is much more important to ask the right questions in order to be able to measure and of course a) discuss and b) improve the right aspects in your company. Too many questions can make an evaluation complicated and less productive.
Each of the following questions can be answered on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).
Conclusion – Agility Health Radar
An Agility Health Radar helps you check the health of your organization before it becomes "sick" of something. At the same time, it helps you uncover untapped potential, increase employee satisfaction and performance.
If you want to know more about agile metrics for management, how to develop an agile transformation roadmap, how to scale agile methods with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) and which popular agile training providers there are, please click on each of the linked blog articles 🙂
And if you want to develop your team and your organization effectively from a psychological perspective, you should check out ours free eBook free eBook to help you on your way. In it, we present 12 team workshops that you can integrate into your retrospectives, for example. Feel free to take a look!
