---
title: Turn results into improvement actions
description: Create an action from a run or through an agent, complete it, and record the tracker issue it became
order: 5
---

An action is the next step recorded against a health check or retrospective - a title, an
optional owner, due date and priority - tracked until it is completed.

## Creating one

Once a run reaches Discuss - and after it closes - the results panel for the dimension on
stage carries an **Actions from this run** list. A facilitator adds one with the **Create
action for …** button, which names that dimension, and captures a title, owner, due date
and priority. The action is stamped with the run and the dimension, so it appears both
there and on the team's list. Everyone in the run reads the list; only a facilitator
writes to it. A retrospective board files actions the same way, stamped with the session.

**Add action** in the **Team health → Improvement actions** header files one without a
run. Pick the team, give it a title, and optionally set an owner, due date and priority;
it is stored as a manual action, open. `create_action` takes the same fields in one call,
plus a description that the API and MCP carry and the form does not.

## The improvement actions list

**Team health → Improvement actions** lists every action the viewer can see - everything,
for an admin; otherwise their teams' actions plus anything they personally own. Filter by
team, status (**Open** covers open and in progress), priority and owner, plus an **Overdue
only** checkbox; every filter runs on the server and the list pages 25 rows at a time.
Tick an action's checkbox to complete it and untick it to reopen it - an admin, the owner,
the creator, or any member or manager of the action's team may.

An action past its due date is marked **Overdue** on the row, and a nightly sweep sends
its owner one Inbox notification and fires one `action.overdue` webhook event per action.
Assigning an owner notifies that person; `action.created` and `action.completed` fire on
the matching writes.

## Linking an external tracker

After pushing an action to Jira, GitHub or another tracker through that tool's own MCP
connection, an agent can record the resulting issue key or URL against the action.
`set_action_external_ref` stores the provider, the issue key and an optional URL, and
every action read returns it.

## Correlating against absence

`correlate_health_signals` lines a dimension's trend up against absence. Given a team's
closed-run history, it walks it period by period against approved leave days per member
in the same window, flagging **inverse movement** when a dimension falls while absence
rises, and **leading decline** when people's felt-direction votes turned negative before
the average did. It returns the aligned series and the flags, and leaves the reading to
the agent.

> [!AGENT]
> List Platform's open improvement actions, then correlate Platform's health trend against absence data - if the Workload dimension still looks worth acting on, create an action for it with an owner and due date.

## Worked example

Marta ticks "Rebalance Platform's on-call rotation" done on **Improvement actions**. When
[Workload dips again after Platform's next Pulse 5 run](/docs/health/trends/), she asks
her agent to list Platform's open actions and to correlate the dip against absence before
she files a new one.

## Related

- [Read a team's health trends over time](/docs/health/trends/)
- [Team health checks](/docs/health/why/)
- [Connect Claude to SquadBear](/docs/getting-started/connect-an-agent/)