The management team at Probation Digital decided to embrace OKRs this last few weeks as a means to bridge the gap between some log term goals and sprint goals. Super pleased we’ve decided to do this after promoting the idea last year. So this week I’ve been reading some of the books and blog posts from previous attempts at this, and also some more from Neil. Rather than the format Christina Wodtke advocates (more of a qualitative objective to get teams fired up and enthusiastic) we’ve gone with an hypothesis based approach, which Gav (one of the Delivery Managers at MoJ) has used before and taken from the book Super, Safer, Happier (though there’s not a heap load in the book about OKRs, it is a fantastic resource for doing agile in large organisations).
Conscious that we want teams’ to own these, and want to find a format that works for us, this week has mainly been about drafting things and learning what feels right, and why.
One of the things that’s helped me to figure out where to focus is the Eisenhower Matrix – which Wodtke mentions:
The stuff that is important and urgent is the *stuff you’ll do anyway* whereas important and non-urgent are things ought to lead you closer to your goals. I see that a lot at work; adding questions to a risk assessment, providing a route to a different type of referral or case r etc. help operational work to be done, but won’t transform it. So OKRs can help us look up and focus on the non-urgent but probably more transformative work.
A far more trivial thing that I’m excited about is to write and sketch more, of which this is a first attempt, and I’m trying paperlike on the iPad to see if that makes it feels more natural. Seems to divide opinion.
update:
