Scaling OKRs
After a year of experimenting with OKRs, we’re getting a lot better as a team in setting achievable and ambitious objectives and key results for the quarter. The approach appears to be working, as this week our help was requested by a member of our IT leadership in helping set OKRs for five other teams across our IT department. This presents a new challenge for us, in that we’ll get to learn about scaling OKRs and how we can use them across multiple teams to create departmental (and scaling to organisational) alignment. With the fact that the key results are SMART in their nature, it should also mean personal objective setting is a lot easier for people. I know this is something a number of people (including myself) find difficult, so if we can introduce something that makes this easier then it’s another potential win for our team.
Agile Assurance
I had some good conversations this week with multiple people in our Assurance team who wanted to learn about applying Agile either to their own work internally or developing further offerings to assist clients.
It makes sense why an offering around an empirical, data-driven approach would appeal to clients, as well as the fact it’s focused on the roots of Agile around empiricism and transparency. An interesting learning for me in our conversations was just around how many misconceptions there are when it comes to metrics/measurements for teams to use. The language used such as ‘Items committed Vs. Items delivered’ or ‘Estimate Accuracy’ are almost all set out with a bias of ‘it must be the teams fault’ — rather than looking at underlying system symptoms, as well as focusing on outcomes.
A good few hours coaching however managed to reset some of these misconceptions, so I’m looking forward to the next steps in us developing something that will ultimately aid organisational agility.
One of the partners in one of our business lines for Assurance seems dedicated to adopting Agile within his team(s), which was great to hear. So often it feels like our role is around convincing people why Agile is the right fit for them, whereas this was very much one centered on the how, rather than the why. We pickup again first thing Monday morning (I love a sense of urgency!) and already I’ve got lots of ideas in how we can help them adopt a pragmatic, flow based way of working based on Agile principles.
The Dip
This week I started reading The Dip, a short book by Seth Godin. The book explains how you might be in a dip, which may get better if you persevere, or that you may get stuck, and it will never get better no matter what you do.
According to the book, Winners quit fast, quit often and quit without guilt — until they commit to beating the right dip for the right reasons. It’s a good short read, and useful for anyone going through wider change programmes, who may need some supporting reading around the dip they may be in.
Next Week
Next week I’ll be recording a podcast with a couple of my colleagues on ‘bringing goals to life’. Given one of our three goals for this performance year is around taking an ‘agile by default’ approach, we want to give people some assistance and (hopefully!) inspiration around what that means and how everyone can help contribute towards us achieving our goals.