How to use our free Team Barometer to achieve the best results for your team

Completing the assessment is simple: complete the questionnaire, get an email with the link to the questionnaire, complete it and get a full report delivered to your mail inbox in a minute or two. The questionnaire looks like this and there are 33 questions in total:

You can do the assessment alone or with the whole team (it’s much better to have a discussion). For each question you need to choose the option that describes your team the best. The goal here is not to get an A+, but to identify the potential issues, so try to be honest when you answer.

Some questions might feel not super relevant (e.g. if you are a maintenance team and the question is about customer research). You can then choose what is closest to your overall team culture (e.g. if you were customer-facing, would you be doing customer research?), or just choose a random answer and ignore the results for that part whatsoever.

Last 4 questions are targeting IT teams, so if it’s not your case (i.e. you are not writing any code), you can answer “N/A” to all of them.

The final result you will receive by email within a minute or two after completing the assessment, will look something like this:

You get evaluated based on 7 categories: Agile Basics, Team & Communication, Customer & Product, Backlog and Planning, User Stories, Daily Processes and Engineering Practices (only if you write code). For each category you get one of 5 levels, ranging by criticality from “Critical problems detected” to “Your team is doing fantastic job”, description of key issues and a list of suggested actions.

Assessment also includes a spider chart showing the overall situation in your team and some general notes about the assessment.

So here are the steps I would suggest you to take after completing the assessment

Print the results out (use A3 or bigger format) or paste a screenshot to Miro or some other online collaboration tool. It is important to discuss the results with the team and decide together your next steps, so create an environment where you can look at the results, take notes and communicate.

Some things might be irrelevant to you, and you might disagree with certain results or suggestions. That’s okay - each team is different, and even the best Agile practices might not always work. You know your team better than I do, so cross out the stuff that is not applicable or that’s outside of your control and focus on things that are relevant to your team. You can even do it first, before bringing the results to the team to save everyone some time.

I would start with the items in red & amber, but of course it’s up to you to decide what has the highest priority. Prioritization is important, because trying to implement lots of changes at once would cause chaos, frustration - it will bring more harm than good. So identify 1-3 items that you are going to focus on next month or so and agree that you will come back to review other things once you fix the most critical issues. If you are having troubles prioritizing, consider the classic feasibility-desirability-viability diagram and choose the items that are the closest to the center.

For the top priority items identify some action items. Again, we are not trying to change everything, because it won’t do your team any good. Define a few very specific items that you and your team members will do in order to improve certain aspects of your team’s life. The action items should be specific, time-bound and assigned to owners. You also need to be clear on the next steps - how and when you are going to assess the results of the actions you are taking.

It is good to keep doing the assessment once in a while. Of course you can access the link from your email once again, but I would recommend you to focus on having regular retrospectives instead. Team needs to learn how to identify the problems and come up with solutions on their own.