In A Nutshell

Team health is assessed by the team to help the team - it must never be a “quality audit” performed by someone outside the team. The results of a health assessment can be used to help identify and prioritise improvements that the team can make. Using the results as data in the context of a sprint retrospective can be a useful way of achieving relevant and substantial change.

We want the data taken into our retrospective to be accurate and appropriate. If we attach incentives to the health check, or make them competitive in some way, then we encourage team members to game the results. This is why we emphasise that team health is assessed by the team only to help the team.

In any case, as with all agile measurements we should never expect to compare the results across teams. The ability, work and context of every team are different, so we should expect health check results to be different too.

The only potential organisational analysis that can be valid is a review of trends over time. If we have made changes in the organisation and we see consistent changes in the health of many teams, it might be reasonable to assign some of the benefit to the organisational change we have made.

References

Philip Rogers on Medium discusses Team Health Checks