Even if you run on shorter agile cycles you need to know where you want to go in the mid or long run. This is not only essential to have a great product and be successful on your market, but also to inspire your employees regarding the current role, contribution and the future of your organisation.
Content
How to plan your North Star or Strategy in an agile way?
How to break down your Strategy into OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)
How to inspire and include your teams into the OKR process?
How to plan your North Star or Strategy in an agile way?
Usually in quarter 4 of every year, companies are reviewing their long term strategy / goals or inspirational North Star. This is crucial to understand that the short term targets and daily actions lead to a more future oriented and aligned outcome throughout the entire organisation.
Once you know and you are aligned on the rough direction of your organisation for the next 1- 3 years, we can look into the shorter Objectives (3-6 months) and the Key Results (measurements) we want to achieve.
Everything you do on a daily basis to bring you closer to the short term Objectives and Key Results are actions, task or issues pending on your management and implementation methodology.
There are two ways to plan your strategy or long term goals:
Operation based Strategy (by departments or hierarchical teams)
Business Value based Strategy (by strategic layers, topics, projects)
If you truly want to be agile and foster project and cross-functional collaboration in your organization, we would highly advise to adopt a business value based strategy. That means instead of asking the departments or teams about their goals as sub goals to the company and let them work in their structures, define first what are the topics you want to achieve for the upcoming years and later decide which people can be the best to achieve these topic or strategic layers.
An operation based strategy siloes the organization from the top and works mostly in KPI based and standard operation environments rather than agile or innovative organizations.
How can you break down your strategy into OKRs?
After we have the strategy and the main topics defined, which we want to work or achieve the upcoming years, it is time to limit the scope into one year objectives. The questions to ask in a planning workshop are:
What are our top priorities for the upcoming year? What do we want to tackle first?
Which goals or projects can we realistically achieve within 12 months?
Do we have enough talents and resources for that?
Once we have 3-5 yearly objectives, we would than break it in to a rough and estimated quarterly planning (What are the main goals to achieve in Q1, Q2, etc.). It is crucial for OKRs not to fall now into the microplanning trap of KPIs, to plan each quarter already at the beginning of the year. That's why this breakdown is just an estimation.
The next step in the OKR process is to plan diligently the Quarter 1 with all Objectives, Key Results and probably actions and projects on company, team and project levels.
As part of the Keynote Speech we made a workshop like exercise for participants to come up with their own inspirational and measurable short term OKRs:
In this OKR Holiday Exercise, people normally choose locations as objectives and the purpose fits to the locations:
Objective (with purpose): Team-building in Bali to foster team collaboration and fun
Key Result 1: Have minimum 2 cross-team activities in 2 days
Key Result 2: 80% of the staff knows each other and has collaborated in the teams
Key Result 3: 90% of the staff rates the company trip good and meaningful
It is important that Key Results are measurable and achievable in a 3 - 6 months OKR cycle.
If you are interested in implementing OKRs in your organization, please have a look at our online courses or contact us directly to support your in your organization with OKR Trainings or full OKR Pilot Roll-out for one quarter.
Certified OKR Champion
This course can be taken as an 8 hours inhouse course with an instructor at your organisation with online test and certification
or as a complete online training certification course on OKRChamp.com
How to inspire and include your teams in the OKR process?
Similar to the OKR Holiday exercise in the last chapter, we would like to encourage you to roll-out OKR Goal Setting through alignment workshops rather than top down decision by one or two leaders.
That means on company level we would make a workshop with the wider management (can include department and team leaders) and on team or project level we would host it with the entire team. This workshops ensure that all voices are heard and that also new ideas or changes for each quarter are taking into account, rather than a strict 1 year planning with fixed monthly or quarterly KPIs. In this OKR workshops we also encourage everybody to have action or task ideas how to accomplish these goals and results and would ask for retrospective feedback on how we can improve working together as a team or project.
Besides having OKR Champions as internal facilitators would also help the change management and roll-out process to create a safe space and contact points for people to ask any questions or seek support internally.
If you are interested in implementing OKRs in your organization, please have a look at our online courses or contact us directly to support your in your organization with OKR Trainings or full OKR Pilot Roll-out for one quarter.
Certified OKR Champion
This course can be taken as an 8 hours inhouse course with an instructor at your organisation with online test and certification
or as a complete online training certification course on OKRChamp.com
Speech & Webinar Conclusion
Giving these Keynote Speech / Workshop and Webinars to several audiences in South East Asia and Europe, we received a lot of positive feedback that a quarterly planning could be useful in this fast changing VUCA environment.
Having a North Star or Strategy in place, supports to keep the management on a longer term commitment and give the teams the inspiration for their daily tasks and short term goals. Combining both is very powerful to achieve results with the participation and ideas from all employees and to organize more innovative projects rather than just operational execution.
For more information how to implement OKRs successfully or to inspire your teams on a keynote speech or workshop, please contact us on transform@asiapmo.com or on our contact form.
This blog was written by Carsten Ley, Keynote Speaker, Trainer, Entrepreneur & Enabler in Customer Experience, Project & Business Transformation leading large scale project implementations in Retail, E-commerce, Banking, Consulting & Experience Management for companies like Deloitte Germany, VW Mexico, Rolls-Royce UK, Lazada Vietnam and H&M South East Asia. He founded 2018 Asia PMO, a consulting firm focussing on getting clients fast and efficient into implementation of company objectives, customer & employee experience improvements to foster a result- and team-oriented environment.