Fix Your OKRs – Back to First Principles

By |2022-12-10T12:00:40-05:00December 7, 2022|Agility, Business Agility, Evidence-based Management, OKRs|

Context OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have become the latest management framework to suffer the fate of becoming popular too quickly, to the point where in many organizations, OKRs are a theater/charade with little useful substance or benefits. That’s a shame because OKRs have huge potential if used effectively. So let’s go about fixing your OKRs!  Why OKRs Let’s start with the basics. What are OKRs even about?  OKRs aim to help you execute effectively on what matters most (your [...]

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Iterating faster with SAFe

By |2022-12-14T17:19:33-05:00November 30, 2021|Agility, SAFe, Scaled Agile|

Here’s a frequently asked question in the SAFe community: I wanted to understand what SAFe says about someone who wants to go faster than 2 weeks of iteration? I mean the whole PI concept is based on 5 iterations worth of planning. What if a team/organization wants to develop and synchronize faster than 2 weeks? Is speed going to be compromised by following the standards of PI cadence?Here’s my take:Adjusting Cadence Length in SAFe — Can you? Should you?SAFe considers the 2-week iteration [...]

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Improving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR Flow

By |2022-12-03T17:11:09-05:00November 29, 2021|Agility, Business Agility, OKRs|

Improving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR FlowToday, I wanted to share two quick observations about OKRs.Too many teams working on each strategic OKRI encounter many organizations that use OKRs. Too many of them have this crazy matrix where the high-level OKRs — those that aim to achieve the organization’s strategy — map to too many teams/functions in the organization. This creates a need to cascade the OKRs, create sub-OKRs, or other techniques which eventually create a larger and larger distance [...]

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Organizing around Outcomes with OKRs and Scrum

By |2022-12-14T17:20:01-05:00November 22, 2021|Agility, Business Agility, OKRs, Scrum|

Aligning Scrum Team Topology to Strategy with OKRs and Product GoalsYeah, I know. Could I squeeze more buzzwords into the title? I guess I could include Digital Transformation, Cloud, AI, and Machine Learning for effect. But seriously, I wanted to share some insights around how to align your Scrum Teams to your strategy leveraging OKRs and Product Goals.Driving Change Using OKRsWe maintain performance by tracking the health of Key Performance Indicators(KPIs). We use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to drive performance change. [...]

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COVID19 and Agile — a fresh perspective on uncertainty, complexity, empiricism and flow and what to…

By |2022-12-14T17:21:21-05:00April 29, 2020|Agility|

The COVID19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.When it comes to our work in Agile teams and organizations, the first thing we need to acknowledge is that the first thing that happened to most of us is that we were tumbled all the way down from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs top levels down to the bottom — to our physiological needs. At the time we’re hoarding Toilet paper is [...]

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The difference between Planned vs Actual vs Actual Actual Business Value when it comes to SAFe PI…

By |2022-12-14T17:24:40-05:00October 22, 2018|Agility, SAFe, Scaled Agile|

Actual is a relative term when it comes to business value delivered by a SAFe PI Objective. We had a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago in an Implementing SAFe class and I promised a blog post about this. Here it goes.Planned Business Value — Making sure Business Owners and the Agile Team are on the same pageLet’s start from the basics though. PI (Program Increment) Objectives are used as a “back briefing” mechanism by Agile Teams on an Agile Release [...]

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Musings about “Hard-coded” Frameworks

By |2022-12-14T17:28:20-05:00April 20, 2017|Agility, Change Management, SAFe, Scaled Agile|

A recent discussion on the Scrum Alliance Linkedin group was around Mike Beedle’s claim that “Hard-coded Frameworks are neither Agile or Frameworks” which is clearly aimed primarily at SAFe.I admit to thinking something similar before really getting to know SAFe in depth. Over time I realized SAFe isn’t one size fits all. Far from it.It has many configurations and options. Do we need the Value Stream level? a System Team? at which level? How many ARTs? Component teams or Feature [...]

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