Agile Planning and OKRs: Transforming Your Project Outcomes

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Who your instructor is: Meet Masha, a seasoned Enterprise Agile Coach with over a decade of experience.

• The focus of the course: A concise, practical overview of Agile Planning and OKRs, providing essential tools and templates for immediate application.

• The format and expected outcomes: Engage in hands-on, follow-along activities designed to impart actionable knowledge and resources.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Understanding Agile: Insight into why Agile is a crucial approach, emphasizing its customer-centric focus, responsiveness to rapid changes, and sensible planning structure.

• VUCA World: Explanation of the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) environment and its impact on traditional planning approaches, highlighting the necessity for Agile in a world full of unpredictabilities and complexities.

• Agile vs. Traditional Planning: Discussion on the limitations of the traditional iron triangle of planning (scope, schedule, budget) in contrast with Agile’s flexible and adaptive approach, emphasizing Agile’s ability to deliver customer value amidst changes in schedule and budget.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Goal Setting in Agile Planning: The lesson explores the differentiation between outcomes, outputs, and health in Agile planning, emphasizing their significance in goal setting.

• Understanding Outcomes & Outputs: Delving into the distinction between outcomes (final business results and goals) and outputs (work produced towards the goals), using practical examples like running a marathon to illustrate these concepts.

• Focus on Team Health: Explanation of the importance of monitoring the health of teams and the organization, outlining how it indirectly impacts outputs and outcomes. The lesson underscores the Agile approach’s focus on achieving goals rather than maximizing resource utilization, illustrated through a relay race analogy.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Agile Planning Overview: Introduction to Agile planning through the analogy of an ‘Agile Planning Onion’, highlighting its multi-level, granular approach compared to traditional planning.

• Planning Levels: Explanation of various planning levels within Agile, ranging from setting a vision (long-term) to daily planning (short-term), each with different degrees of granularity and focus.

• Agile Principles: Discussion on key Agile principles such as delaying decision-making to the last responsible moment, continuous experimentation, and maintaining flexibility while staying committed to the overall vision and roadmap.

Let's test what you have learned so far!

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Introduction to Vision Setting: Explanation of the first step in Agile planning - setting up the vision, essential at both organizational and team levels.

• Understanding Vision: Vision is described as the 'North Star' guiding the direction of the organization or team. The lesson stresses the importance of having a clear, memorable vision that informs goal setting and priority establishment at later planning stages.

• Crafting a Vision: Recommendation to answer three crucial questions to form a vision: Who (the customer), What (the value or solutions provided to address customer needs), and Why (the unique value proposition). Engaging all members of the organization or team in this process is crucial for alignment and buy-in.

In this lesson, we will explore:

Navigating Miro for Agile Planning:

Gain familiarity with the Miro board as we dive into a hands-on exercise to utilize this collaborative online tool for effective Agile planning. Whether you're new to Miro or an experienced user, you'll learn how to duplicate boards, navigate the interface, and use features for real-time teamwork.

Crafting a Product Vision with Miro:

Learn the step-by-step process of creating a clear and actionable product vision using Miro. We'll identify customer segments, understand their needs, and determine the unique value your product offers, all within a Miro board template designed for collaborative input and strategic planning.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Introduction to Agile Roadmaps: Explanation of how Agile roadmaps differ from traditional project management roadmaps, primarily focusing on outcomes rather than deliverables.

• Focus on Outcomes: Emphasis on formulating milestones based on desired outcomes, which are primarily customer and business value-centric, rather than on specific deliverables.

• Flexibility and Purpose of Roadmaps: Agile roadmaps are flexible, adaptable, and not strictly tied to deadlines. They are tools for prioritization, managing dependencies across teams, resource adjustment, and maintaining transparency within the organization. Roadmaps in Agile are living documents used for reference and alignment and can be adjusted as needed based on new learnings and insights.

In this lesson, we will:

• Utilize Miro Board for Roadmap Planning: Learn to navigate and customize Miro for creating roadmaps that highlight key value areas essential for customer and business success.

• Prioritize and Structure Strategically: Acquire techniques to identify, select, and prioritize value areas using Miro’s interactive features like color-coding, tagging, and emoji reactions.

• Align Values with Execution Timelines: Master the art of mapping prioritized value areas to specific timelines, ensuring a clear and actionable roadmap that aligns with your product goals.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Introduction to OKRs: Introduction and explanation of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as a tool for goal-setting within Agile planning, emphasizing the focus on outcomes rather than deliverables.

• OKRs Across Organizational Levels: Discussion on how OKRs can be implemented at different hierarchical levels, from overarching organizational objectives to departmental and team-focused goals. This structure promotes alignment and transparency across the organization.

• Time-based OKRs Approach: Insight into how OKRs can be time-bound, with the flexibility to set either annual or quarterly objectives. The preference for a quarterly approach is due to the dynamic nature of market demands and the need for timely adjustments.

• Structure of OKRs: A deep dive into the dual components of OKRs: bold objectives that encapsulate the desired outcome, and key results, which are quantifiable and measurable criteria that define the success of those objectives.

Let's test what you've learned so far!

In this lesson, we will cover:

• OKRs vs. KPIs: You will learn the distinction between OKRs and KPIs, understanding that KPIs are not goals but valuable metrics to monitor, providing necessary data for organizational adjustments.

• Purpose of KPIs: The lesson will instruct you on the function of KPIs as indicators and monitors of various output metrics, highlighting their role in informing and refining the strategic approach defined by OKRs.

• Analyzing KPIs Appropriately: You will be guided on how to effectively interpret and respond to KPIs without mistaking them for ultimate goals, ensuring they contribute positively to achieving broader organizational objectives outlined by OKRs.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Setting Objectives: You will learn various approaches to setting objectives for your organization and teams, with an emphasis on crafting objectives that are bold, ambitious, and derived from the company’s vision or the OKRs of the organizational level above.

• Examples and Characteristics of Objectives: The lesson provides examples and explores the nature of effective objectives, illustrating that they should be challenging yet achievable, clear, straightforward, and progressively elevating in their targets over different periods.

• Alignment with Higher-Level OKRs and Customer Needs: You will be guided on how to align team-level objectives with higher organizational goals and vision, while still ensuring that these objectives are deeply rooted in understanding and addressing customer needs and values. The lesson encourages crafting objectives that reflect both organizational alignment and customer-centric thinking.

In this lesson, you will learn how to set up objectives for effective product development:

• Setting Objectives: Engage in a structured process to establish clear objectives using brainstorming techniques. This is vital for aligning with the company's vision and roadmap, ensuring that your objectives target key outcomes for both customers and the business.

• Clustering and Prioritizing Ideas: Learn to categorize brainstormed ideas into groups like user experience, security, and business value. This step is crucial in identifying common themes and prioritizing the most impactful objectives.

• Selection and Simplification: For teams new to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), the lesson emphasizes selecting a limited number of objectives (three to five) to maintain focus and simplicity, thus enhancing the likelihood of achieving these objectives.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Setting Ambitious Key Results: You will learn the importance of establishing key results that are ambitious, with an understanding that achieving 70% of these key results is often a significant success. The lesson emphasizes that key results should stretch and challenge the team, driving them towards greater achievement.

• Measuring and Refining Key Results: Guidance will be provided on how to measure success through key results, even when all necessary data isn't immediately available. The lesson advises starting with draft key results and refining them as more data becomes available, with examples provided on how this can be approached and achieved.

• Avoiding Tying OKRs to Performance Management: You will learn the crucial principle that OKRs, and key results in particular, should never be directly tied to performance management. The lesson explains the risks involved with linking OKRs to performance evaluations and compensation, as this can discourage team members from setting ambitious goals and undermine the OKR process.

In this lesson, we will cover:

Defining Key Results on Miro: Learn to articulate and set measurable key results that align with your business objectives using the Miro board. This process begins with brainstorming potential metrics and refining them to be specific and actionable.

Crafting Measurable Success Indicators: Discover how to turn qualitative objectives, like enhancing customer satisfaction, into quantifiable goals.

Prioritizing and Finalizing Key Results: Understand the importance of prioritizing a concise list of key results with your team, making them specific, time-bound, and attainable. Learn to focus on a select few (three to five) to ensure clarity and achievability in driving success for your objectives.

Let's test your knowledge!

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Introduction to Backlog in Agile Planning: You will learn what a backlog is in Agile planning, distinguishing it from a simple to-do list. The lesson introduces the concept of a continuously prioritized backlog, where items are ranked in order of importance, with highest priority items detailed and ready for implementation at the top.

• Creating and Prioritizing a Backlog: The lesson guides you through the process of converting OKRs into a backlog by identifying strategic initiatives (or epics) for each OKR. You'll understand how to initially rank these initiatives and the importance of focusing on and detailing the top-priority tasks while leaving lower-priority tasks for later consideration.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Understanding Epics and User Stories in the Backlog: You will gain a profound understanding of the core elements within a backlog such as epics and user stories. This section will elucidate the significance of these elements in driving customer value, delving into the meticulous details of crafting them to ensure they are imbued with clear objectives and a robust value proposition.

• Mastering the Art of User Stories with the INVEST Criteria: Explore the nuances of creating powerful and effective user stories by employing the INVEST criteria. In this part, discover how each user story can be made Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable, thereby ensuring that they resonate with clarity, purpose, and a strong alignment towards achieving customer-focused outcomes.

• Adopting Vertical Slicing and Understanding Various Backlog Items: This lesson will guide you through the strategy of vertically slicing user stories to ensure each represents a standalone value. You will also be introduced to various other backlog items like spikes, tasks, and bugs, learning their unique roles and contributions to the Agile project ecosystem and how they can be effectively managed to optimize resources and outcomes.

In this lesson, we will cover:

• Understanding Estimation in Agile: Gain insights into the core purpose of estimation in Agile, emphasizing the alignment and shared understanding within the team regarding the scope of work. Unlike traditional project management, where estimation often revolves around man-hours or days, Agile focuses on nurturing a collective awareness and agreement on the effort and complexity associated with each task or user story.

• Story Points: A Focus on Relative Estimation: Explore the concept of ‘Story Points,’ central to Agile estimation. Unveil how story points embody a relative estimation technique, balancing elements like size, complexity, and uncertainty in the assessment of work items. Understand the rationale behind the utilization of Fibonacci sequence numbers in categorizing tasks, fostering a nuanced approach beyond mere numerical quantification of effort.

• Promoting Team Alignment through Collaborative Estimation: Learn about the role of team collaboration in the estimation process. Discover how collaborative estimation ensures that the team navigates through different perceptions and viewpoints, promoting a unified understanding and consensus on the magnitude and intricacy of each work item or user story in the backlog.

In this lesson, we will delve into the dynamic and crucial process of Backlog Prioritization in Agile. Here’s a synopsis of what you’ll learn:

• Constant Prioritization: The Agile Way: Discover why prioritization is an ongoing task that transcends various layers of Agile planning. Unveil how continuous re-evaluation and re-prioritization of the backlog is essential in sustaining agility and relevance in project undertakings, facilitating the maximization of value delivery to customers.

• Guided by Little’s Law: Enhancing Value Delivery: Engage with Little’s Law and uncover how minimizing work in progress and inventory contributes to accelerated value delivery. Grasp how focusing on fewer items enhances the agility and responsiveness of teams, driving quicker customer feedback and facilitating necessary adjustments.

• Frameworks for Informed Prioritization:

  • Value-Effort Matrix: Explore the simplicity and effectiveness of prioritizing backlog items based on their value and effort. Learn how this matrix simplifies decision-making, allowing teams to identify and focus on high-value, low-effort tasks.

  • Desirability, Viability, Feasibility: Dive deeper into a more nuanced framework that considers desirability, viability, and feasibility, offering a multi-dimensional perspective for prioritizing items effectively.

  • Weighted Scoring Method: Uncover a strategic approach that allows for the prioritization of backlog items based on weighted scores across various business criteria, such as customer satisfaction, safety, and revenue.

In this lesson, we will cover:

Understanding Regular Planning in Agile:
Learn about the importance of having regular meetings in Agile. These meetings help keep the work flowing smoothly and ensure that everyone knows what to do.

Setting Up a Planning Routine:
Discover essential planning strategies like setting goals and organizing tasks. We’ll discuss how to make the planning process flexible to meet the needs of different teams and projects.

Improving Through Reflection:
Find out how review and feedback sessions help teams improve. These sessions allow teams to learn from their experiences and make their planning and work processes better.

In this lesson, we will cover:

Daily Planning in Agile:
Explore the key role of daily planning meetings in Agile. These essential meetings help the team align on daily priorities and discuss any challenges faced.

Communication and Problem-Solving:
Learn the importance of sharing updates and solving problems as a team. We’ll discuss how effective communication can prevent issues from becoming bigger obstacles.

Flexibility in Planning:
Understand how teams can adapt when unexpected changes happen. We’ll cover how to adjust plans and actions in response to new priorities or issues.

Participation:
Discover why everyone’s attendance and input are crucial in daily planning meetings. We’ll discuss how to stay connected and share updates even when not physically present.

Let's test your knowledge one last time