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Agile practices have become the default way of working for most companies in the last decade, as it allows companies to be more responsive to changing customer needs and market conditions. However, implementing Agile in a company can be challenging, especially when dealing with multiple teams with varying levels of experience. In this post, we will discuss how we adopted Agile practices and used a leaderboard to improve the rate of adoption leading to better team performances at Cashfree Payments.
Challenges We Faced
The Program Management team at Cashfree Payments is entrusted with the adoption of new practices. Like most companies, we faced several challenges while implementing Agile. To overcome these challenges, the Program Management team along with the Agile coaches took a phased approach to Agile implementation. We began by coaching each team on Agile principles and attending their Scrum events. However, it became really difficult to attend every team meeting, and tracking progress was a very tedious task. We observed that teams were losing track of Agile adoption if, either one of our Agile coaches or the program managers, were not part of the planning and other meetings. This became one of the biggest challenges: making teams self-reliant and tracking the progress of the teams in adopting Agile.
This was when we decided to create a leaderboard to help teams adopt Agile practices and improve their effectiveness.
Using a Leaderboard to Improve Team Performance
To address this issue, we decided to create a leaderboard that tracked various basic parameters across the different phases of the Scrum framework, such as backlog refinement, planning, execution and sprint output.
Each team was given points based on their performance in these areas. We wanted to make sure that the leaderboard is transparent and accessible to everyone, so we used automation available in Jira to calculate the scores and created a simple dashboard using Google’s Looker Studio to track the scores. We then made it accessible to all team members and leaders in the company. Now, each team had access to their own scores, as well as the scores of other teams. The leaderboard helped to create healthy competition among teams, and it became a source of motivation for teams to improve their performance.
This also helped to create a sense of accountability and transparency, and it helped the Program Management team and the Agile coaches to identify areas where teams were struggling and focus on those areas.
Soon teams started talking about the leaderboard in their planning and stand-up meetings. Some teams proactively identified Scrum masters among themselves who started reaching out to the Agile coaches and the program managers to understand where they were lacking and what they could improve. They asked questions related to estimation, story splitting, spilling over of tasks, ad hoc tasks, managing inter-team dependencies, planning, retrospection etc. We also noticed a few teams creating their own Jira dashboards so they could proactively look at different metrics.
This was a positive change, instead of pushing the teams, it became more of a pull from the teams themselves to improve.
Scoring System
We created a scoring system that was simple and easy to understand. Each team is given a score out of 5 on each of the parameters based on their performance in the following areas:
- Story Pointing and Description: Story grooming is the precondition for effective sprint planning. We wanted to create a culture where each story is discussed in detail and estimated. Having a proper description as part of the Jira story assured that the product managers, developers and QA team had the same understanding of the scope of the feature and participated in the estimation. So, we started to give points to each team based on how many stories had a proper description and story points assigned to them. In a nutshell, we ensured that requirements are documented and analysed by teams before they start implementation via this metric.
- Alignment to the Quarterly Plan: At Cashfree Payments, we have a very efficient quarterly planning process. It is said that a plan is only as good as its execution. To ensure we are on track, we reward teams if their sprint goals align with our quarterly goals. We track this in Jira and points are awarded for higher adherence. This ultimately resulted in the reduction of ad-hoc tasks as teams became more aware of the changes going into the sprint or quarter. This also improved the overall Say/Do ratio of our teams.
Of course, there was enough room to accommodate any urgent features. After all, we are Agile!
- Execution and Adherence to Sprint Plan: While working with teams, we observed that a lot of tasks were getting added to the sprints after the start of the sprint. This was either due to bad planning or the story not being properly discussed during the grooming or could be some other reason.
Jira has a way to tell you how many stories are added after the sprint starts. We use that feature to inform teams on these aspects. So, we are able to assign points to teams if they stick to their sprint goal, minimising the number of ad-hoc tasks and stories added to the sprint.
- Sprint Output: All this is no good if teams are not completing their stories, so teams are assigned points based on the SPs completed at the end of the sprint and also for the target achieved against the quarterly goal.
- Retrospection: This is one aspect of Agile implementation that teams often tend to neglect and not do. By making it a part of the leaderboard, we encourage teams to focus on improvements and optimisations. Learnings from past sprints are baked into new sprints.
Checks and Balances
The whole process was designed based on trust and we trusted our teams to stay true to the system. Another beautiful aspect of Cashfree Payments’ amazing culture!
And as someone rightly said: trust but verify. We knew that as with any point-based system, there were chances of teams tricking the system to gain an advantage over other teams. We minimised that by automating the whole process as much as possible and doing regular checks and reviews of the teams’ metrics.
Results
Once we conceptualised the idea, it took us around a week to come up with the dashboard. Educating teams on the dashboard and how it will help them took another 2-3 months and a lot of effort. But the effort and wait was worth it! 🙂
The leaderboard significantly impacted Agile adoption, leading to better team performance. Teams started to take Agile practices more seriously, and we noticed an improvement in their sprint planning, execution, and outcome.
One of the significant benefits of the leaderboard was that it creates a culture of continuous improvement and helps teams do better on at least 2 (out of the 4) values of the Agile manifesto:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools: The product management and development teams started collaborating more often as everyone could see the metrics and wanted to improve.
- Working software over comprehensive documentation: We observed a higher completion of the stories that lead to product deployments more often.
Overall, we have seen a positive impact on the quality of the work being produced, as well as a more engaged and motivated team.
The leaderboard further helps us identify areas where teams are struggling, and we are able to provide additional coaching to help them improve. We used the feedback from the teams to adjust our coaching and training programs to better meet their needs. This helps us address some of the resistance that we had initially faced as now there is more willingness to change from the teams’ side.
Way Forward
The scorecard was initially designed to touch on the various aspects of Agile implementation and we started with the areas where we lacked the most and wanted to improve. We started with 5 simple parameters and have been continuously evolving to align with the current situation of the teams. We have done this by replacing one or two parameters regularly where we feel the teams are maturing and are consistently scoring high.
So far, the integration has been with Jira only, but we plan to integrate with other tools used at Cashfree Payments and come up with QA and delivery-related metrics as well. This, along with DORA metrics, will help the teams deliver better stories faster.
Conclusion
Agile implementation can be challenging, but with the right approach and tools, it is possible to achieve success. Using a leaderboard to incentivise teams to adopt Agile principles and improve their performance can be a powerful tool for companies.
This is what one of the engineering managers had to say about the leaderboard:
“Agility leaderboard and practices have greatly helped the team adopt various good agile practices. Previously, we used to track velocity but now, we check the other finer aspects like tagging, acceptance criteria, adding description etc. These best practices have helped developers in teams know the task better which in turn is helping in delivering the features quickly, and with fewer bugs.”
Does this sound like an environment where you would thrive? If it is, then we have some exciting opportunities lined up for engineers like you!
