Coffee with OKRs · 6 min read
A team that has its own work and OKRs on top was given a badly written objective
We open this conversation with a comic strip in which a boss hands an employee 25 strategic goals for the coming quarter. It is funny for a moment, and then it stops being funny, because organisations set lots of goals for exactly this reason: they think they have lots of resources. What is left afterwards is not focus, but a list of projects and initiatives pushed all at once.
From the episode · in Polish
Kanban one floor above a single team's board
In the recording with Radek Orszewski we show a board of objectives with their full life cycle, from the pool of candidates to the conclusions, we break down an objective of entering a new market into a product feature, a legal analysis and a campaign, and we discuss how the time of people from marketing or sales is contracted into a working group for the quarter. The part on why splitting time by percentages doesn't work, and how to tell that a team has fallen off the plan, starts at around the thirty-sixth minute. from 00:36:15
The recording is being edited. Leave your address and you'll get the link when it's ready.An OKR says what is important and how to measure it. It doesn't say whether work on it is actually flowing, and that work is largely invisible, so without visualisation it stays in people's heads. This is where the conversation starts, and it starts with a shift: Kanban stops being a single team's board. It works fractally, meaning it repeats itself at successive levels. A team's tasks add up to a card at the level above, an entire product becomes a card in the organisation's portfolio, and a lens of objectives can be laid over all of it.
This shift brings three things that objectives alone don't have. The first is a visible split of work: on the same board and in the same tool the team uses every day, you should be able to tell a task done for an objective from the day-to-day. A separate tool for objectives is a tool someone will forget to log into. The second is a limit on how many things are done at once, instead of throwing yourself at all the objectives in the first week of the cycle. Better to have three closed than five nearly done, because nearly done gives you neither a result nor a feedback loop, and conclusions are exactly what these objectives are set for. The third is feedback loops matched to the level, which you are allowed to tighten the closer you get to the deadline.
The sharpest sentence comes elsewhere, though, and it is uncomfortable for anyone who writes these objectives in companies, so for us too. If you hear in a team that people have their daily work and OKRs on top of it, that means something went wrong with the objectives, not with the team. An objective should break down into concrete operational tasks, not sit next to them. In practice, instead of promising someone a percentage of their time, you agree on a share of objective-related tasks that are always present on the board. The percentage is an illusion: of eight hours, after meetings and breaks, six are left, and after one urgent drop-in task, three. If over successive two-week periods only the day-to-day comes off the board while the tasks serving the objectives stand still, that is a signal you have gone off plan. You can't cram it into the last two weeks of the quarter, because this isn't revising for an exam.
Takeaways
Four things Kanban adds to quarterly objectives
- 01
Objectives live where the work is
A separate tool for objectives is a tool someone will forget to log into. On the team's board you should be able to tell an objective task from the day-to-day at a glance: a different colour, a separate lane, anything visible.
- 02
Three closed instead of five nearly done
Eighty per cent progress and zero closures give you neither a result nor a conclusion, and conclusions are exactly what objectives are set for. Instead of throwing yourself at all of them from the first day of the cycle, set a sequence.
- 03
An objective needs health metrics
An objective can be achieved in a way that costs the company more than it gives: entering a new market while neglecting clients in the existing ones. Next to the result metric, put one that will catch this, and one that leads.
- 04
A tool won't work through dependencies for you
In a large organisation the biggest problem isn't a lack of objectives, but that dependencies between teams and people can't be seen. Visualisation will show them, but they are resolved in a conversation, for which someone has to make room in people's calendars.
The whole topic in one place
Project management and OKRs: how do you combine them?
If you are looking for an answer more general than one method, we have gathered the whole of it in the text on project management and goals. It starts from the claim that working on an objective is project work, leads to one shared list of priorities instead of two, and ends with a map of the other conversations in this series, in which we took up further methods one by one.
Author
Lena Zhukova
founder; strategy workshops, quarterly sessions
Founder of OKR Poland. For twenty years she has worked with boards of companies from 30 to a few thousand people; she wrote dozens of strategies with them and helped implement them in more than 40 organisations.
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