Lessons learned using the OKR framework @ VRT

Some time ago, I wrote a medium piece discussing the combined use of OKRs and Scrum. This piece reached quite a decent audience, for which I am very gratefull. The article concluded with ‘We are still learning to use OKRs effectively. It will probably take some time for the benefits … to become apparent’. And learn we did! So I believe it to be no more than fair/logical to follow this up with this article about what we as an organisation have learned from our experimentings with OKRs.

Let’s start by admitting (partial) defeat, the role of OKRs is no longer as big as we anticipated/hoped it to be. Some teams are still using them and do feel it helps (their) team(s) to achieve better clarity and focus as well as communicate this to other stakeholders & teams. But the ‘dream’ of stearing our Digital department on the basis of a few strategic OKRs and leveraging that to better align all teams remains just that, a dream. Keeping in mind that losing a battle is not losing the war, we might retry again later at which point we will be able to take advantage of the following insights:

Less is more (not too many OKRs)

We started out engaging every team in individual & cross-team sessions to define some (2 to 3) Objectives with each objective having 3 to 5 key results for the upcomming quarter.

Looking backward & just doing the math, this just doesn’t make sense. A quarter is 3 months, about 12 weeks. Given a minimum of 3x3 key results (usually more), this means hitting a key result approximately every 1,5 weeks which should make the key-results more finely grained than a sprint goal (assuming 2 week sprints), which they weren’t. So in practice, this didn’t work very well. It just resulted in lots of missed KR’s and lots of missed objectives.

Changing this to ‘one OKR per month’ was a logical conclusion and a huge improvement with regards to ‘focus’.

More is more (don’t start too low in the org)

We tried implementing OKRs on a department level. But no department is an island, particularly not if your primary focus is creating digital solutions for/together with other departments.

This can become a challenge when there is a big gap in perception about what ‘good goals’ look like. Our department can advocate OKRs, but if (one of) our partnering department(s) do not subscribe to this view; alignment is quite quickly lost instead of strenghtened.

If other ‘goals’ (read ‘deliverables’) have already been decided upon with the partnering departments & those departments are not interested in this new way of goalsetting, this may lead to teams ‘going through the motions’ of define OKRs which are then unused going forward because the other ‘goals’ are what ‘really’ matters.

In some cases, this is clearly a result of customer/supplier thinking in which ‘goals’ are framed as ‘scope to be built’ which does not match the OKR intent. Fixing this in situations in which OKRs are not introduced on a corporate level has proved to extra challenging.

Objectives mindset (mindset changes take lots of time & effort)

The brain is wired to think a certain way through repetition. People who have been ‘trained’ to think of add in value only through ‘delivering more features’ will have a hard time thinking in terms of ‘measurable impact’.

And of course, defining good OKRs is hard work!
It’s way easier to just sum up some nice & shiny features that get everyone excited and call it a day.

This problem is exacerbated when the same type of ‘ingrained thinking’ is shared throughout an entire team. People will keep reverting to ‘thinking in feature lists’ instead of clearly defined impact without someone to continuously remind & challenge them to change this old way of defining progress/value. The amount of effort this requires from a coaching perspective was higher than anticipated.

OKR visualisation is not easy

One of the benefits of OKRs should be transparency about (other team’s) goals. This implies a way to regularly share them in some highly visible way. Some experiments have been conducted to try to achieve this (big whiteboard in the main office, weekly meeting, wikipages). But when all’s said & done, none seemed to ‘stick’. Ideas/insights about this are very welcome. :)

OKRs do not replace a clear ‘Mission Statement’

OKRs are finite goals that are by definition reachable/attainable and for that reason transient. They should be ‘rooted in/supported’ by a clear Company/Department mission statement.

When I use the term Mission Statement, I like to compare it to the ‘Great Just Cause’ as it is coined by Simon Sinek in ‘Start with Why’. A big, inspirational, but ultimately unattainable goal that drives the very core of the organisation.

If there is insufficient clarity about this ‘Great Just Cause’/Mission Statement, OKRs proposed by the different teams will miss a solid foundation, giving the whole excercise the feeling of having been built on quicksand.

OKRs can be used to drive the organisation forward. But they can only be truly effective if ‘forward’ has been sufficiently (and repeatedly) clarified. OKRs are finite goals that need to be rooted in an ‘Great Just Cause’ to give them the propper foundation.

To clarify, VRT as a company has a clear vision statement (“The VRT wants to inform, inspire and unite and so reinforce Flemish society”). However, as a digital department we partner with all of the strong brands of VRT (Ketnet, Radio2, Stubru, Canvas, Sporza, …) who all have their own take on this vision & how to implement it. The end result at that time was diffusion of the vision’s clarity, making it less effective as a guiding principle (for us as a department).

In closing

Propper goal setting is a very important part of any great endeavor. But as with all things that really matter, they are not easily attained.

Personally, I am still convinced OKRs can be a great technique to increase focus/engagement & alignment in (agile) organisations. Furthermore, the complementarity with Agile frameworks & approaches is clear as illustrated by my previous post.

Be aware that there are no silver bullets, no quick fixes that will transform your world overnight. We have experimented, we have learned, we are stronger for it.