Intro
As manager you will often face the challange to "keep an eye" on certain KPIs or areas of interest.
The best way to do so is by using health checks.
Example: Pre-Mortem outcome
Imagine you just ran a succesful pre-mortem. You found a lot of areas that might derail your project.
What do you do with these? Keep in mind? Put into OKRs?
The best way are health checks.
Create a document that contains all topics of the Pre-Mortem in the following form:
- Topic
- Health check status
- Description
- Status of the health check (optional)
Then revisit this document once a month and rate the health of each of the topics. I prefer 3-4 health check tpoics. But there can be more of course.
If you got topics that are concern to many employees you can use regular polls to get their sentiment regarding that.
Example: Maintaining KPIs
Any organization is running on KPIs. And KPIs should be monitored continuously.
Examples are "sales renewals, MRR, hiring goals" and more.
The principle is the same as above. Have 3 or 4 columns and review the list every month.
Check out how Gitlab does it [1].
Summary
The health check is a very good technique to focus your and your team's attention to a certain amount of important metrics. Heavily recommended!