The agile transformation concept is simple. It’s about trans-form-ing, id est changing the organization’s form to be better.
So how you do it:
- Find what you do good and brainstorm ideas for new ways to do more of it
- Find your weaknesses and brainstorm ideas for reducing or removing those
- Put all those ideas in a backlog sorted by value and effort. You want the most valuable needing the least amount of effort on top.
- The agile transformation MUST be agile itself:
- Break down the backlog and start executing it incrementally in short iterations
- Revise often the backlog, based on the new learnings and the new state of the organization
OKRs on other hand are a very cool, modern, and effective method of goal setting:
- Find goals or objectives which are realistic, but ambitious
- Put the focus on the outcome, not the output. In other words, to understand how close we are, we measure the value. This value is not the work we have done, it’s the benefit as a result of it. This is what we want to measure.
- Make it explicit and put numbers
The concept is simple too, but a bit hard to do right. You can read more about the OKR technique in our previous post.
Combining both described concepts looks very natural and organic. Use OKRs to create our Goal-driven roadmap of the Agile transformation. It is the strategic implementation of the change, the tactical is the backlog emerging from this Roadmap.
This separation btw. OKRs and Backlog of the change is a very powerful tool that enables us to decentralize the operational decision-making supported by a strong strategic vision creation.
Of course, changing the operational priorities – the backlog of the change, we will revise often our ORK-driven roadmap of the transformation.
By doing all this we can easily and naturally become OKR-driven in our day-to-day work. So, we will transform our working processes and activities into OKR-driven operational work. This will be the topic of the following blog post.
