How to manage the change of the objective for the quarter
ideation — brainstorming
How can we deal with the change of an OKR once the quarter has started? Which people should we involve in this modification? How much time do we have to do it in an agile way?
I will try to solve all these questions by means of a practical example of a real situation at work ;)
To start, we must know where this change comes from and its reasons, which in our case is a question of the time and scope of the team.
Once we have the information about the change, we proceed to perform a brainstorming exercise on the new OKR with the whole squad (this is the term we use to refer to the PD + PM + Devs team) and the different stakeholders (business and marketing people). This session will take about 1h 30min.
After this session, we will make a presentation of the final Outcome with its opportunities. So within 2–3 days, we can have our new target.
How does it work? This exercise consists of 4 phases:
Phase 1 — Thinking ideas
We will divide into groups of 2 people for the generation of ideas. In this way we will be able to generate 4 ideas to start working on the exercise. Each group will have 5 minutes (with the possibility of extending for more time if necessary). In this first phase, the participants of each group will discuss in a separate area in gather to be more concentrated.
Phase 2 — Ideas improvement
When the timer rings, participants can pass their ideas to the group on the right. Start the timer again and ask participants to add suggestions that complement or improve the ideas already on the template. Each group should contribute to the rest of the ideas. Then the group has to define their idea with the improvements of the other partners ;)
Phase 3 — Voting
Each participant will have 2 votes to distribute among the 4 final ideas (ideas with all the improvements proposed in the previous exercise).
Once we have all the votes cast, we will proceed to the next step
Phase 4 — Effort Matrix
With the votes cast, all the participants will evaluate the effort and impact that these ideas can have in a matrix exercise.
Afterward, we will validate which idea or ideas we can carry out and we will finish the exercise, having a clear solution on how we can achieve our objective.
The final step, we will carry out to finalize the exercise will be a mapping of the final outcome with the opportunities and feasibility that it entails so that we can achieve our objective within the quarter. This exercise will be carried out entirely with the components of the squad.
and … that’s all folks!
I decided to share this information because it worked quite well for us within the team and it helped us to keep moving forward in order to achieve the new objectives involving all the people to have a better alignment between all the people.
I hope it can help you!
