Employee Performance Appraisal: Executing Agile-Based Projects in a Traditional IT Services Organization

Gaurish is a Senior Manager, Projects in Pune, India. He is a PMP and CSM.

  Agile  

Agility, as a concept, has been in vogue for some time now. There have been numerous stories around agile implementations in IT product organizations. Executing an agile project in IT services organizations has its own share of challenges. This article seeks to highlight a part of this challenge, mainly from the employee performance appraisal perspective.

Traditionally, performance appraisals in IT services organizations have been driven by a tiered-quota rating system.  Typically, an organization would have three to four buckets for grading their employees--topmost bucket reserved for crème de la crème, middle tier for the average performers and the bottom tier for the poor performers. Each organization allocates some quota for each of these buckets--thus splitting the employee base amongst these buckets, in the proportion permitted by the quota system.

Thus two team members working on the same application development team may sometimes land up in two different buckets--not due to their performance, but for matters related to perception and organizational politics. This fuels intense rivalry amongst team members to be "visible" and "one up" each other--and leaves team relationships bitter. While this behavior is not uncommon in a traditional project, it can have a devastating effect in an agile environment.

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