We improved Urban Ladder's sprint velocity from 50% to 90%

Mapping the route for roadblocks

We were excited to partner with Urban Ladder, and tried to gain an understanding of their existing processes and efforts before pitching solutions. There were a few aspects that caught our attention, which we addressed initially.

Dealing with server downtime

This was one of our first challenges. Since it was important to have a robust infrastructure in place, we worked closely with their technology team to implement failover mechanisms and create redundancy to minimize the impact of future server issues.

Simplifying ticket creation

Their ticketing system needed some improvements. We refined the ticket creation process to address this challenge, and incorporated clearer acceptance criteria and comprehensive user stories. This helped the team efficiently tackle ongoing tasks.

Enabling knowledge sharing

Since Urban Ladder had a strong internal development team and multiple vendors, it was crucial to facilitate better knowledge sharing, to minimize the gap between teams and keep everyone on the same page. We decided to address this.

Our journey from sprint to summit.

Our consultants reported to Urban Ladder’s VP of Technology and CTO, and received total support and encouragement, which helped us make process improvements faster.

The primary objective was to enable process-led growth for the technology team and set up an agile framework. Here’s how they contributed.

1. Value Engineering: We began by observing the team strength and their delivery cycles. This effort helped our consultants understand what was realistically achievable in a sprint.

2. Process Automations: To minimize redundancy, our team automated over 25 manual processes in Jira. Some primary QA metrics were automated in Jira, including the Defect Detection Percentage (DDP) to measure testing effectiveness, Test Failure Density, QA age, and severity. These automations helped Urban Ladder’s team set up a prioritization scale to deal with tickets.

3. Sprint Reports: Our dedicated Scrum Master maintained and generated fortnightly sprint reports to help Urban Ladder’s leadership team understand their sprint velocity and internal utilization and efficiency. This helped them make data-driven roadmaps for future goals.

4. Scrum Events: We were instrumental in setting up scrum ceremonies for regular monitoring and updations. As part of our framework, the team organized and managed daily standups, fortnightly sprint retros, and facilitated goal-based sprint planning and reviews.

5. Technology Process Framework: Since Urban Ladder had an extensive team of both internal and external technology partners, we simplified how they managed internal documentation and knowledge assets. This simplified handovers and knowledge transfers, especially to new team members, without 1x1 interventions or meetings.

With our efforts, we elevated Urban Ladder’s sprint velocity from 50% to 90%.