Companies have come a long way from treating its employees as liabilities, to nurturing them as assets. The team management too has evolved since the past couple of decades. Leadership styles have changed from an autocratic role to a supportive role. Leaders have realized that employees cannot be forced to work. Rather they need to be shown the right path and provided with the right support to help achieve the corporate goals.

By looking at the various employee engagement stats & that the millennials are increasing in numbers at workplaces, it is crystal clear that there had to be a better way for managing the employee performance. That is where UpRaise is trying to prove a point. Agile project management is in vogue. UpRaise takes the underlying agile principles & applies them to the employee performance management processes.

And, the concept is already gaining traction. “We released UpRaise as an add-on for project management tool JIRA. This was, sort of our way to validate the idea. Even before the product is fully built, we already have 100+ teams relying on UpRaise”, says CEO Anand Inamdar. The team is already gearing up to launch a typical SaaS modelled version of UpRaise, that will be independent of JIRA.

What is Agile Performance Management (APM)?



As opposed to traditional performance management, APM focuses on development rather than just compensation assessment. Although, even the traditional approaches are supposed to better the skill set & improve performance - they fail to do so. APM, with the help of Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) combined with continuous feedback produce a seamless developmental orientation.

OKRs are one of the famed goal setting methodologies evangelized by the Silicon valley giants likes of Google, LinkedIn & Zynga. This agile goal setting approach is known for its transparency & participatory nature of goal setting. The quarterly cadence (which is recommended) keeps the individuals on their toes by making use of stretch goals. All of these are key tenets of an innovation inclined work culture.

Anand furthers this with “the nature of this approach subtly enforces a culture of communication & constructive criticism amongst team members. Suddenly, even the individual contributors have a say in the direction of the company. The obvious consequence is enhanced engagement. This exercise assures that even the means are given equal importance as that of the end goals.”

Why build an independent platform?



“OKR philosophy is relatively new to the Indian scenario. Whatever few OKR softwares cater to this market, target larger companies and charge premium prices”, explains Anand. “UpRaise is set to be one of the most affordable OKR platform, especially for Indian companies. It is suitable for small and medium sized companies, who are still in the developing stage”, he adds.

“Given the kind of traction we are seeing & keeping in mind the numerous requests that came through for an independent UpRaise, now is best time ever to move swiftly. Expansion beyond this (JIRA addon) niche market was anyway on the cards & we’ll be launching the standalone UpRaise in April 2017”, he informed.

What began as a niche market for UpRaise, has now found takers on a large scale. It would be interesting to see where this market goes in the coming years.

About Amoeboids Technologies:

Amoeboids Technologies is the company behind UpRaise. The company believes in insightful usage of advances in Software & Internet Technologies. Two JIRA add-ons developed by Amoeboids - UpRaise for Employee Success & Automated Release Notes are highly sought after in the Atlassian Marketplace.
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