A useful place to start is to understand how Scrum Masters see their teams, especially if they’re embedded in their teams. Scrum Masters are the ones who know first-hand what’s working and what’s not, what the interpersonal relationships are like and what buy-in exists in the team to whatever Agile method the company uses.
A useful tool to gather their information is Survey Monkey. Create a series of questions that will give you a ‘health check’ of how Agile is used in your organisation. When you receive the results you’ll see how the Scrum Masters rate themselves on their agility and how they see the various practices adhered to within their teams. Looking across the teams it is then possible to see common themes. For example, the results may show that there is no dedicated Product Owner and this is evidenced by non-attendance at Sprint Planning Reviews and Stand ups.
Whatever the results, with careful analysis, it will point toward areas for focus. If a team doesn’t have a Definition of Ready, for example, you may find they’re also failing their Sprints. Working with the Product Owner and team develop a DoR following the INVEST principle.
Next, establish whether the responses match what you see. For example the results might show that the Scrum Master sees their team as high performing when observations indicate they’re under-performing with a siloed approach to getting user stories done.
Work out a plan with their Coach to help the team see what they’re doing vs what they’ve said they want to be. If the team hasn’t created a social contract, do this so you know what is important to them. We used Lyssa Adkins High Performance Tree as a model to identify the behaviours, traits/characteristics and evidence team members wanted for their team. Of course there are many factors that are bundled up in this process. It will depend on the openness of the team, the experience of the Scrum Master and the Coach. The goal here is to reveal what you see back to the team so they have an opportunity to adjust their practices (or not). Remember, the Coach is helping the team be accountable and transparent, rather than telling them what they should do.
There is likely to be enough material from the health check to inform the highest value areas to focus on. This happens at a meta level. The team continues to make incremental adjustments each day by inspecting and adapting based on the latest information, and more deliberately at the end of each iteration during the Retrospective.
An Agile Health check is a useful way to understand how the Scrum Master sees their team/s.
Agile Coaching Journey 