Automated Team Health Checks via Slack

Secret Escapes shares how they help their engineering teams via a key Plandek feature

As an Agile Coach, I have been a massive fan of the Team Health Check for many years. Popularised by Spotify in 2014 and adapted by many organisations ever since, it’s been a great way of collecting some more qualitative data based on the feelings of a team.

When I joined Plandek, I was pleased to see the Team Health Check being valued alongside all the quantitative data collected from Jira, GitHub and the like. With a simple Slack integration, Plandek will ping a quick survey to your teams and then organise the responses into a couple of metrics cards.

Secret Escapes has been using this integration for a while now, so I caught up with Sunny Singh, Agile Delivery Manager, to find out how they have found this feature. He first told me:

“Feedback has been very positive from our teams, with the survey automatically being sent via Slack. It’s much easier to fill in the survey from our previous process and we’ve seen increased participation rates”.

The Spotify Team Health Check traffic light system

With all the Team Health Check data sitting next to the other metrics Sunny uses on a regular basis, he gets a great overview of team trends over time.

“Results are easily shared across teams, with Team Health Checks increasing our visibility and transparency on how our teams are doing. This really helps to identify which teams need more support and highlight any areas of concern”.

It is great to hear about an organisation finding the right balance between what both their data and teams are telling them and using this to drive continuous improvements in all they do!