Agile development and OKRs go hand in hand with perfection. It has been said that agile development reduces the costs of changing your mind. This is because agile planning requires a regular and planned cadence to check development progress, assess the business context (competition, customer requirements, regulatory requirements, market conditions) and make adjustments based on this information. Clearly communicating objectives and key results provides transparency.
OKRs are not tied to individual performance. Instead, they link team performance to company performance, allowing the team to align. Because they are public, OKRs allow team members to reject any initiative, idea, or meeting that is detrimental to one objective without contributing to another objective. I've been talking about OKR and Agile at some of the most important publications and conferences in the world.
I must admit that, in all my experience of reading, writing and working, I was unaware of the concept of objectives and key results, or OKRs, until very recently. Therefore, instead of dividing a single initiative between teams and having them set different objectives (which can cause teams to lose sight of the real objective), a single OKR shared between teams is created. This approach also allows people at every level of the organization to see the direct impact of their work in relation to the key results of the OKRs with which they are aligning. Nor did I know that Google, LinkedIn, Oracle and Netflix had stated that they use OKRs to align and govern their teams.
Articles from the InfoQ main page Agile goal setting with OKR: objectives and key results. Henrik-Jan Van Der Pol, creator of the OKR tools, points out that having too many objectives produces a diluting effect and suggests having only five objectives measured by four key results (hence the name, objectives and key results). Objectives and key results, commonly referred to as OKRs, are an objective-setting framework focused on providing objective evidence of progress (key results) toward achieving a set of business outcomes (objectives). We must consider the time it would take to write, review and, finally, evaluate the team's IP objectives in OKR format.
Player-level OKRs are designed to help provide results to people with higher-level vision who hold seats and win championships. OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal setting framework created by Intel and adopted by Google, Oracle, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox, among others. When used in SAFe, OKRs can help support the core values of transparency and alignment between business and portfolio strategies, and the work of Agile Release Trains and Agile Teams to meet this strategy. The combination of clear objectives with a small set of specific, measurable results and a regular process of reviewing progress towards those measures is what makes OKRs really useful.
To establish their OKRs, individuals and teams discuss with each other to determine interdependencies and create horizontal alignment. Since Andy Grove invented them at Intel and their subsequent much-publicized adoption at Google in 1999, many leading technology companies have adopted Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
