Temperature check
Sometimes it can be valuable for teams to take a temperature check on their agile ceremonies/recurring team meetings and reflect on how they think the meetings are working and fulfilling their purpose. The purpose of taking a temperature check is to ensure that our common meetings always bring value and that we as a team work as efficiently as we possibly can.
The temperature check can be done at a themed retrospective or as a part of a workshop and will be performed in 3 steps - voting on recurring meetings, reflecting on the meeting with the lowest score, agreeing on experiments to improve the meeting.
Material
Whiteboard, post-its, and pens or similar online
Time Frame
1-1,5 hours
Number of people
Core team
Prepare
Prepare a document, digital or analogue with three frames/spaces - Vote, Reflect, Agree (see image above). If you have an online tool like Miro or Mural that is also very advantageous to use
Book a workshop with the team or use a already booked retrospective
Workshop/Retrospective
Step 1:
Start the workshop letting the team vote on the recurring meetings you have. The scale to use for voting is 1 - Not working well/Not fulfilling its purpose to 5 - Working very well/Fulfilling its purpose
Everyone in the team gets 1 dot per person and meeting
Look at the voting result and select the meeting with the lowest score and bring it into step 2
Step 2:
Replace the question mark in the template with the name of the meeting from step 1
Let the team reflect what works well with the meeting and what could be improved. Everyone reflects individually and writes their reflections on post-its and add them to the board
Let the team go through their reflections and share with the rest of the team
Step 3:
Focus on what could be improved and formulate actions or experiments that the team can try out to make the meeting better and more efficient
If possible also agree on how long the experiment will run before evaluating if the experiment was a success
Note: In this example the workshop format has been used to evaluate agile ceremonies but the format could be used for other topics as well that you see that it would be useful to do a temperature check on. (For example “Easy to release”, “Cooperation in team”, “documentation”)