One thing sure to add governance, accountability and IMPACT to an agile culture is the use of OKRs (objectives and key results)
Agility gets a bad reputation from those who, in less enlightened times, thought they had a license to do what they wanted, avoid committing to timelines, and not be held accountable for the investment they had been entrusted with. It’s no wonder that those kinds of teams didn’t scale up or change an organisation.
As the focus on return on investment has become more vital, Objectives and Key Results have come into their own. OKRs are a winning way to measure the impact of outcomes and a great tool to bring about a culture that focuses on the goals and how the needle is moving every day. You can’t hide from OKRs and if you are defining the key results in a manner that is quantitative (e.g. a 10% increase in monthly new clients as part of measuring the success of a new online product).
In this example, we lay out the objective, which is to enable a business to scale the number of peak online users (e.g. a concert ticket booking system) and not degrade the performance by using cloud technology to burst out to more compute capacity on demand. The key results reflect how we know success has been achieved towards the target values:
Once we’ve agreed on the key results as impact we want to measure (the “what”), we need to break these into deliverables, which are ultimately hypotheses for things that will enable us to see if our key results can be achieved. The teams in the value stream take on these deliverables by discussing the “how” aspects of the work that needs to be done. The teams transpose deliverables into epics, which are features of value to the product offering. Epics are then decomposed into user stories; the smallest chunk of work that a team can execute on within a sprint. So you get the pattern: we move from objective and what impact we are seeking to achieve, to deliverable, epic and finally through to a user story that someone is implementing in parallel with other people as part of realising the objectives.
How often do we do this OKR work?
We aim to work within a quarter by keeping each epic as time-bound within that quarter and we can quickly assess if our hypothesis is working at every end of sprint demo. This is a process that repeats for every quarter and people get into a rhythm of decomposing the OKRs into stories to get regular feedback. If we are not making an impact then we pivot or stop. This is what working in a digital world looks like.
OKRs bring the transparency, governance and accountability to teams and leadership and enables a shared sense of ownership. It also takes away the excuses that agility can’t be compatible with strong governance and delivering to agreed timelines.
We’ve been working with clients on how to drive their digital business with OKRs, so talk to us about how you can do it too!
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