Agile Check-Ins

Overview

Check-Ins give us a good picture on how teams are performing, the areas of improvement they’re working on and also give us something to measure between check-ins with them to see where changes have been made that benefit the team. This page is mainly for teams who work at Holiday Extras but there may be some tips you can take if you’re not part of the organisation.

Just The Three of Us

There are now only three Agile Coaches at Holiday Extras who need to cover all of Web as well as other areas of the organisation who request support. This means we’ve had to change the way we work and not align ourselves to individual teams in the way we used to. However, we still need an idea of where teams are and how they’re improving so that we know where we may need to offer advice and to help the teams improve themselves as a result of our support.

We therefore came up with Agile Check-Ins. The way we do these has evolved and will continue to change, but essentially the aim is to have conversations with the whole team and stakeholders, attending meetings for a period of time and also analysing metrics like velocity and scope creep to get a full picture of how the team are performing. Nick wrote a blog when we first started doing these which is slightly outdated now but still explains the context well.

This isn’t about making judgements, spying on teams or telling teams what to do. Check-Ins are about trying to support multiple teams with the little resource we have, helping them to continuously improve as well as having something tangible and comparable to show the difference of what we’re doing.

We’re currently measuring:

• Velocity (where teams use points, Thoughput where they don’t)
• Burnup & scope creep (where teams use points)
• Cumulative flow
• Autonomy
• Resilience
• Leadership
• Motivation
• Morale
• Team feedback
• Retro frequency
• Retro quality
• Remote first
• Stakeholder satisfaction

This all sounds very technical and clinical, but again the aim here is to support teams. A team with a “Red” or “Amber” rating can use that knowledge as a chance to look and see where tweaks to process, communication or other areas can be made and where doing this should make everyone’s working lives happier and simpler. If support is needed it can be given. Our ultimate hope is that teams reach out for that support rather than waiting for their Check-In on the path to continuous improvement and an Agile mindset.