Scaling Agile - Flipkart’s Agile Transformation Journey (Part 2)

Continuing from part 1 of the series, having established the Agile Principles and Practices at team level the next logical step for us in the journey was to scale the practices. Given Flipkart's scale and complexity there was a need to add the scaling best practices to ensure greater coordination across multiple teams and BUs to keep everyone aligned.

Aligning to common Sprint rhythm

While @Flipkart most of the teams had a common sprint duration of 2 weeks, one of the early steps we took before we started to scale was to align all the teams to a single sprint rhythm, starting and ending them on the same day with the same Sprint #. This allowed the whole organization to align multiple team-plans.

Standardizing JIRA template across domains

While Jira was the ALM tool of choice for both Product and Engineering teams, unless we got all domains like Design and User Research to use the same tool the real cohesiveness would not have been possible. Flipkart’s design leaders Ajith Sowndararajan , Mangala Naveen Kumar Samir Bellare along with the User Research leaders Prathima Sharma and Ashwin S volunteered to experiment with Kanban. The coaches helped customize the Jira template and workflows to suit the needs of these domains. I am happy to share that our User Research team could easily be the pioneers using JIRA to manage the user research work.?

Visualizing Strategy up to the Execution

Defining the requirements hierarchy structure in line with the strategy helped the teams visualize their commitments to achieve the strategic goals using the JIRA plan view; monitoring execution via JIRA provided the ability to drill down from the high-level Strategic goal to the last leaf of story. The transparency and alignment around strategic goals and how we organize work brought crystal clarity to both the leadership and teams alike; this was a groundbreaking change across the organization to have a single source of truth without ambiguity on what is the expected outcome, relative priority and progress towards completion.?

Our Agile maturity was evident when it enabled Value Delivery of higher ROI items, we were able to better manage the change and volatility by way of creating smaller and manageable deliveries adding to the flexibility & predictability. Further continuous learning enabled a self-aware team that would in turn unlock the way to faster time to market. - Rohit Jalan DoE

Scaling Framework

An important decision we had to make was the choice of the right framework for scaling. While we borrowed from SAFE, Scrum@Scale, LeSS and Enterprise Kanban we created custom scaling practices well suited to Onetech@Flipkart’s unique needs. A few practices that helped us in our journey were: Value Stream Mapping, Collaborative multi-team Releasing Planning, Scrum of Scrums, User Story Mapping for Initiative Elaboration, Initiative Retrospectives and Focus on Metrics at different levels.

Reorganizing teams to unlock agility

With focus on achieving business metrics, getting predictability in the team and reducing the time to market the teams were restructured to form a cross functional team. Some of the steps we took to enable this change were clearly defining the key business metrics, ensuring clearly measurable business outcomes and introduction of CoE for continued focus on strengthening the platform. The focus was on monitoring progress towards our business metrics and adapting to the necessary challenges with the new structure.

The more we invested in this mindset of being truly agile and enabled self-sufficient pods to go after well-defined problem areas - the better are the results. In areas where we couldn’t completely solve for self-sufficient pod structures, the benefits of higher visibility of work done and same level of collaboration are less evident. Making it an obvious choice going forward. Richa Arora DoP

Cross team planning and collaboration

There are many initiatives in the organization that are executed across BUs. The teams started to create the backlog using an incremental value creation thought process, identifying smaller testable outcomes across teams; Engineering teams from across the BUs collaborate to create initiative plans using best practices from PI planning, however, scaling it down to suit the initiative needs.?

In this new way of planning all the teams considered various aspects of requirements, created stories and assigned them to sprints upfront, they further collaborated to identify and address cross-team dependencies. As a result, a more confident delivery timeline was known well in advance that not only helped us avoid last-minute surprises and delays, but also enabled additional requirements to surface earlier. We were able to resolve these early to have minimal throw-away work, adding to both efficiency and customer delight. Somnath Sinha Maha Patra SDoP

Gamifying Agile maturity

While improvements were observed in the individual BUs we needed a consistent gauge of agile maturity across the organization. The coaches created an Agile Maturity scorecard well aligned with the organization goals of agility. In line with the self-organizing team culture the respective cluster leaders would self-assess the maturity of their clusters and set targets to fill the gaps to reach the next maturity level.?Soon the Maturity scorecard became a healthy competition among the various clusters, each leading the path and inspiring the others to catch up.

Productivity Dashboard across Organization

That which is measured and reported improves exponentially- Karl Pearson

As the organization matured the global JIRA dashboards started to take shape. We moved from PPT based reporting to JIRA based reporting to leaders. This saved a lot of time from creating customized PPTs that could easily be dated. The JIRA reports in contrast were dynamic and real to the current point in time. We have a consistent way to measure of Productivity and turnaround time across the organization.? Soon these productivity metrics started to trend up. We could see the same agile principles being applied to the organization at scale as for a single team: the lesser the distractions to the team the higher the team's outcomes.?

This is not about adopting JIRA or story points or any such practice - it's about changing mindset fundamentally to think about metrics and outcomes first. And empowering teams to have no dependencies and move fast towards those outcomes. Anand Lakshminarayanan BU Head Shopping Experience and Commerce Cloud

Summary:

This sums up my 2-part series on the overall journey thus far, I will keep the community updated as we strive to achieve further milestones in our transformation journey. I am grateful to my team of Agile coaches who supported this journey: Sandeep S , Balaji Hariharan and Antony Willet and many more along with the FK leaders who made this journey possible. Please stay tuned to hear more from me and my fellow Flipkart leaders on how we addressed some of our unique challenges and some interesting accounts of this journey as we channelized the change.?