Checklist: How is my team doing? ⨉ Melnyk

Here is a short checklist to perform on monthly basis.
Consider this as a metric dashboard reflecting the team and process health.

	What’s going on?
	Each team member works on the tasks they are responsible for. There are no situations where areas of responsibility are blurred.
	Processes that can be automated, removed, or simplified have been automated, removed, or simplified. This holds to processes themselves! There is a spec document describing how to write a spec for a new project, how to assign people to it, how to set expectations, when and how to control the implementation, etc.
	All assigned tasks lead toward the goal. If it’s unclear how the task helps achieving the desired result, the task is either dropped or receives the lowest priority.
	There is no (constant) firefighting. Minimal overtime; good work-life balance.
	There are clear DoR¹ and DoD². All parties are on the same page regarding when a task is ready to be taken into development and what criteria should the implementation meet to be considered as “completed”.
	There is an established employee motivation process. People are interested in working together as a team.

Like any other metrica, these checkpoints don’t guarantee a great success. But at least, they helps detecting major issues early.

DoR AKA Definition of Ready: how should the task look to be ready for implementation.
E.g., there are clear functional requirements, design mock-ups, etc. ↩
DoD AKA Definition of Done: the list of criteria of “completeness” of the task.
The DoD includes the “extras” like non-functional requirements, test coverage and other quality metrics. Mature teams contribute to the DoD and raising the quality bar. ↩

Checklist: How is my team doing?