Team Practices Group/Health check survey

Survey goal
The team health check survey is intended to measure qualitative aspects of working on a WMF engineering team. The voluntary survey can be used to inform targeted areas of improvement for individual teams, measure improvements in team health. The survey should be completed collaboratively by an entire team rather than by individual team members.

What is Team Health?
Team health is a qualitative measure based on the team's assessment of 11 focus areas (‘Quality’ and ‘Fun’ are two of the areas, for example) that were chosen as health indicators for WMF teams.

Survey focus areas
These 'focus areas' are qualities/aspects of WMF engineering teams that, when taken collectively, can serve as a barometer of a team's overall health. This list should be kept to 10-12 high-level focus areas universally applicable across WMF engineering teams.

Previous surveys

 * FY2014-15 Q1

Influencers/Indicators
These are important factors that influence and/or provide an indication of awesomeness/crappiness for various higher-level focus areas. Many if not all of these came up while brainstorming the high-level focus areas for the survey, and are included here to help frame thinking about certain focus areas.

Timeline to launch

 * Post draft documents to mediawiki.org by 11 August 2014 ✅
 * Finalize documents for launch by 31 August 2014 ✅
 * Begin collecting data as early as 1 September 2014 to set baselines at the end of Q1 FY2014-2015, which will help inform team improvement efforts through Q2 ✅
 * Inspect and adapt the process quarterly thereafter

Implementation details
Surveys had been facilitated on a quarterly basis until FY1516 Q1, when the Team Practices Group put them on hold. As of FY1617 Q2, the surveys are available by request. The Team Practices Group can facilitate if available, or they could coach teams in how to facilitate them.

Artifact: Invitation Template

Each area of the survey will be evaluated by teams on a 5-point scale of ‘crappy’, ‘crappy/mediocre’, 'mediocre', 'awesome/mediocre', or ‘awesome’. If there are areas on the survey a team doesn’t care about, they can be skipped. Teams can add areas that they feel are missing from the survey. The survey will evolve with the collective needs/perspectives of the teams through quarterly evaluation by Team Practices Group members.

One such adaptation is the option, available as of FY1617 Q2, to conduct the survey with blind votes in the focus areas. The facilitator would reveal the distribution of how the team rated their performance in a given focus area. Then the team would then have the opportunity to discuss why they voted for the 5 point rating that they did. The facilitator would then toss the first vote and ask the team to vote blindly again to see if the discussion changed the distribution. The rationale for this new option is give insight into the distribution of opinions across a team and to create a safe space for dissenting opinions by trying to mitigate the effects of anchoring and groupthink.

See also: Guidance for facilitators

Open questions
See talk page