Leading retailer optimizes its digital journey with KnowHOW

A leading US retailer sought to enhance operational efficiency and maintain its competitive edge in a fast-paced market. With a focus on delivering superior customer experiences, it recognized the need to modernize its Agile practices and leverage data-driven KPIs for decision-making across its delivery teams.

Challenge

This retailer faced several challenges in maintaining consistent engineering quality and agile maturity, while managing high-paced retail operations. Their teams struggled with:

• Limited visibility into sprint performance metrics such as defect density, lead time, and velocity.

• Aligning engineering and business teams to a common set of goals and KPIs.

• Lack of actionable insights for test monitoring and continuous improvement during project delivery.

The organization required a solution to unify teams under measurable KPIs, streamline agile practices, and drive improvements directly influencing retail operations.

Solution

They partnered with KnowHOW, leveraging its robust platform to track high-bar Engineering and Agile KPIs. The tool enabled teams to:

• Establish entry and exit criteria for testing phases, acting as quality gatekeepers during releases.

• Utilize dashboards for metrics like scope churn, velocity, and commitment reliability, ensuring accurate estimations and prioritization.

• Implement a culture of continuous monitoring to align business and technical objectives effectively.

• Facilitate regular KPI reviews, which became instrumental in generating the right behavior within cross-functional teams.

• Align stakeholders, across organizations and levels, on project status & performance.

• Reduce reporting time, allowing more focus on trend analysis and improvements.

Results

• Real-time, consistent status visibility through KnowHOW has eliminated noise around late callouts for delays, ensuring timely identification of issues and minimizing feature delays.

• KPI benchmarks are realigned after performance improvements. For example, after achieving significant quality gains, the Defect Density benchmark was reduced from 50% to 25%.

• A significant improvement in sprint reliability, helping teams deliver on schedule. 

• Concentrated improvement efforts are spent on highlighted focus areas through Speed and Quality trends.

• Empowers client stakeholders and delivery PODs to make data-driven strategic decisions.