WHY CONSIDER AN OKR FRAMEWORK?
Connie began her career in the investment advising world, coaching and helping her clients with their financial portfolios. Over the following years, she moved into project management by helping new investment advisors stand-up and establish their business. She then transitioned into traditional IT project management a few years later. It was when she was asked by a client to take on the Scrum Master role that she fell in love with Agile concepts, continuous feedback, team empowerment, process improvement, and the rest is history.
Agile Coaching and consulting became her calling. Her span of experience includes helping organizations transform into Agile, establishing new agile start-up teams, as well as working with mature companies and teams to better their processes. The bumps and bruises collected along the way have brought her to the realization that helping organizations adopt Agile practices was less about the practices, and more about embracing change.
We are proud to count Connie as a key member of the SDS team, and value her expertise as an agile coach and scrum master.
~David Pledger, Managing Partner, Strategic Data Systems
Recently, my agile teams made the transition from the SAFe framework to OKRs. This was a big change, there was a lot for us to learn, and we had quite an adjustment period. However, the company I was working for at the time acknowledged this change would be a shift in our agile mindset, that there would be a growing pain period, and assured everyone that we would likely fail at our first and maybe even our second attempt. However, they also said it was OK to fail and we would all learn from it. Whew! That buy-in from leadership was a relief for all of us!
If you don’t know anything about OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, I can personally tell you the biggest difference we saw right away when we began was the time spent in planning the work. Instead of planning out 10 weeks’ worth of work upfront in two days using the previous SAFe framework, which is equivalent to 5 sprints of work, with the OKR framework we held a discovery session for one week and based on what we learned in that week, we planned out one to two sprints of work.
Let’s go into some more details of some of the basics behind OKRs. This will give you a foundation on the OKR framework and help build your understanding.
OKRs are really meant to serve as a means to set goals for a specific time period for an organization and its agile teams. At the end of the time period, the organization and the teams OKRs provide a reference to evaluate how well everyone did in executing their objectives. OKRs create goal alignment in the organization.
The organization should first spend significant effort in identifying the overall company objective for the given time period. They should then communicate it out in such a way that the OKR can truly help teams comprehend and visualize how they can contribute to the big picture and align with other teams to identify their objectives.
To help with envisioning what a possible objective might look like at the organization level as well as the team level, which should ultimately align, here is an example:
The next step in the OKR process is identifying the Key Results! Assuming your objectives are well thought out, Key Results are really the “secret sauce” to using OKRs. Key Results are always numerically-based; therefore, they are quantitative and need to be very black and white. They are the defined “how” in what the team will use to measure success in the objective.
Using the objective examples above, let’s define what the Key Results might look like:
As you have probably come to assume from this material, the goal of OKRs are to be action-oriented and inspiring. They should align the organization to each department and then to each team. They should connect objectives and key results to each part of the organization. Likewise, when OKRs are properly defined, they will:
Want to learn more? SDS can assist you in several ways:
Contact Steve Held at Steve.Held@SDS.io or 513-218-1706 for more information.
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