The SPAS management system

This article was originally published on my LinkedIn page in January 2021.

Hi to everyone reading this article and thank you for being here, I really appreciate it. First thing first: Happy New Year to you, all the best wishes and lots of hugs! Now, without further delays — let’s roll.

This article is about SPAS. No, this is not a SPA resort or a shotgun model. SPAS is a gamified management system that we use in Full HP to award the proactive behavior of our employees. I’ve developed and integrated it, I’ve mentioned it a lot in my previous articles, and now is the best time to let you know more details about it.

When I came to Full HP in 2018, the company was called Fahrenheit Lab and used a waterfall management structure, common for Russian companies. At that point, I’ve already been an avid Agile adept for some time and I offered to try Agile — or at least “Agile-fall” — structure in the new company. At that point, Fahrenheit Lab needed a rebranding and restructuring. I offered the name Full HP, we’ve opened offices and bank accounts in Cyprus, got our internal documentation in order and I’ve started to develop documentation that would serve both as an instruction and as a statute.

I’ve tried to apply scrum by the book but hadn’t seen success with that — you need to adjust every framework that you want to apply before applying it. Because you need to understand the context of your business, of your team, of your goals, etc. With all those aspects in mind, I’ve learned from my mistakes and created the “SPAS”.

The name “SPAS” is an acronym that can be translated into English as “a framework to encourage activity among employees”. Plus, it sounds like a Russian word that means “saving”. Basically, it was an addition to our legal internal documentation like agreements, contracts, and instructions, that regulated the additional activity and personal achievements of our workers. The main idea was to help put an order into our planning process (we actually hadn’t any planning at all), praise the initiative, and help to identify the bottlenecks. Spoiler: it really helped us. After several iterations, of course.

The SPAS has seven sections:

1. Introduction.

2. Main duties and responsibilities.

3. Sprints.

4. Evaluating the side activities.

5. Awards and achievements.

6. Punitive actions.

7. Conclusion.

These seven sections were meant to establish a fixed list of rules and consequences that will be understandable and easy to follow for employees. It helped to increase the transparency of our principles and keep employees engaged because it made the rules meaningful.

The first section determines the terminology that is used throughout the SPAS, lists the software that we use, and takes care of other general questions.

The second section defines what we call the “Main duties and responsibilities” and where an employee can read more about it (spoiler: in the contract).

The third section is more interesting, it is about planning and prioritization. It contains the description of sprints, backlog, concept document, and design document, including forms and instructions on how to prepare them. It says how we estimate the time for each task, how we correct it if we’ve made a mistake. It determines the length of the sprint and the importance of tasks in it. It also describes the five types of rituals we perform — sprint planning, daily standups, sprint correction, release, retrospective analysis.

The fourth section describes which activities outside the sprint count as valuable and how they should be performed — mutual education, sharing experience, team building events, small voluntary tasks.

The fifth and sixth sections are like Ying and Yang. There you can find all the types of awards (from money to badges) and all the types of punishments (from personal meetings to termination of the contract). Fun fact: the most interesting thing here that we tried during our iterations was the Karma system. Each employee had a Karma rate. For good deeds, you receive positive points, for bad deeds — negative ones. Once employees reach a specific positive balance (+50 Karma points, for instance), they can convert it into something good — money, vacation days, items, etc. If the employee goes too far in negative balance (starting with -100 Karma points), the employer could convert these points into something unpleasant like a fine. This system sounded really intriguing on paper but in real life turned out to be a mixed experience. While some people tried their best to receive all the rewards they could, others refused to compete and performed poorly. To avoid negative reactions and to stop the active competitors from burning out, we’ve decided to cancel the Karma system.

The seventh section contains the descriptions of several administrative procedures — where to find other documents, how to apply for a vacation, etc.

This is the structure of the document. I won’t disclose each section in detail but in general, that’s how it works. Each worker has a copy of SPAS, every addition to SPAS has to be discussed with all team members. But once we have a 100% agreement on something, all of us must obey the new rule.

You might ask me: “Where is the gamification in SPAS”? Well, we have additional software that is based on the UI of our game Blocky Cars and involve characters that were made up to represent our team members. In the header, you’ve already seen some of our “heroes”. Each hero has such an interface that shows their statistics and achievements. Check out mine:

You see a lot of numbers and stats — some are tracked from your very first day, some are tracked within a month and then refresh — like “Tasks completed (this month). The number is zero — there were no tasks in January.

But the most interesting part is the Achievements. Let’s look at an Achievements section for a blank account in SPAS.

Every team member has a list of tasks that can be completed to receive a badge. Some badges represent a single-time achievement while others represent a progressing achievement like “Insightful — I” in the picture above. You will receive it for the first time after your first speaking experience at our educational meetings. For a second level you need to deliver 3 talks — and so on. After each “Level up” the guy on the badge becomes tougher and it brings some more fun to these actions.

We’ve tried material rewards but time has shown that any material rewards like presents or money kill the motivation and inspiration. And we don’t need that. We try to fuel up the extrinsic and intrinsic motivation with a combination of a decent salary, a nice level of challenge, and lots of side activities and non-material funny rewards that will keep you engaged.

That’s how SPAS works. It isn’t an independent system, we still combine it with GitLab and MeisterTask but with all that loop we have, we’ve tracked a stable positive dynamic in lots of metrics — tasks fulfillment, development velocity, “happiness” of employees, burnout… In a lot of aspects, our life became better after integrating this agile-fall style of management. I definitely recommend you adjust the frameworks you are trying to apply to fit your needs in the best way possible. Moreover, you need to update your framework regularly to keep it relevant. For you, it could be some small adjustments but for my company, it was SPAS that worked perfectly.

Thank you all for reading this article. It was the twelfth installment of my “Articles” project, the next one will be a retrospective review of the results. See you on February 3rd!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.