Categories
Uncategorized

Collaboratively Establishing OKRs: A Workshop Guide for Scrum Teams

Collaboratively Establishing OKRs: A Workshop Guide for Scrum Teams

In an increasingly complex work environment, aligning team goals is essential for achieving success. This workshop is designed to collaboratively establish the initial Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for your team or project, fostering a clear understanding and ownership of the exciting goals that everyone aspires to achieve.

 What is it?

This is a workshop aimed at collaboratively establishing the initial Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for a team or project to create a clear understanding and ownership of the big and exciting goals that the entire team aspires to achieve.

Scrum team and the stakeholders are invited to participate.

Why is it important?

 Why to use OKRs?

One of the initial challenges when forming Scrum teams is that all team members often have different goals. In such cases, the big picture does not become transparent within the team, and everyone finds it difficult to collaborate and align towards a common goal. 

The OKR approach, compared to setting KPIs, is more inspiring and exciting, allowing the setting of goals and measurable key results that highlight the big picture. It encourages setting short-term goals (~3 months) and offers a flexible approach to changing conditions. It also allows teams to regularly review and update their goals to more challenging ones when necessary.

Conducting an OKR workshop with the participation of all team members and stakeholders ensures alignment, collaboration, and synergy. It strengthens the buy in of team members about the objectives and leads to organizational success by establishing clear objectives and fostering a commitment to achieving them.

Teams become enabled to establish the connection between their work and the company’s main strategies. When they feel how their work contributes, their sense of ownership and the effort they put towards that goal can increase. Therefore, conducting this OKR setting process together as a workshop with stakeholders and the team is valuable.

Since the Product Owner needs to make an opening to align the team and stakeholders with the vision during the workshop, onboard the Product Owner about OKRs before the workshop. Ensure that the Product Owner comes to the workshop prepared regarding the vision by conducting a brainstorming session with them beforehand.

You can see the “How?” section which offers ready-to-use artifacts you can easily apply with oNabu Subscription.

Categories
Uncategorized

Defining the Vision and Goal for Successful Agile Transformation

Defining the Vision and Goal for Successful Agile Transformation

 

In any Agile transformation, having a clear vision is essential to guide the team and ensure alignment across all levels. Why is vision important? Vision provides direction, while well-defined goals offer measurable steps toward achieving that future state. Without a shared understanding of where you’re headed, it becomes harder to make decisions and drive meaningful change. Leaders play a crucial role in shaping this vision, helping teams to focus and align their efforts. Whether you’re leading a small team or a large-scale transformation, defining your vision and goals is the first step toward ensuring long-term success and organizational impact.

 

One of the oNabu advisors and Scrum Master of our team Umut Arısoy created implementable advice for Vision and Goal of Your Transformation.

 

What is it?

Try to imagine the future state of your working ecosystem on your own. (We know that might be hard in the beginning…)

Facilitate a visioning session with your stakeholders to ensure that you’re on the same page.

Define short and long term goals (A north star metric may be helpful).

 

Why is it important ?

The basic differentiator of a Leader is having a clear vision about the future state of a context. Since you will be the person to drive or to guide this change, having a vision or at least knowing about the vision would make things easier for you and for the people in your charge. It would be much easier to say “No” to requests that are nonsense or not contributing to your vision or goals once you have a picture for the future state. Bare in mind that goals can change whereas changing the vision means pivoting from your starting point and may point you to solving another question

 

You can see the “How?” section which offers ready-to-use artifacts you can easily apply with oNabu Subscription.

 

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Agile is a Team Sport: Why Speak-Up Culture is Essential for High-Performance Teams

In an Agile team / organization / environment, collaboration is key. Agile is a team sport where communication, joint decision making and shared responsibility are the cornerstones of success. If any member of the team has a doubt about speaking up, then you might be aiming lower than your full potential obviously. 

Get up, stand up, and speak up for your team!

In today’s work, most stories, tasks require more than one skill and often more than one person to mark the work as “DONE”. Even though sometimes we stumbleupon on cross-skilled people, like full stack developers who can deal with a project / product from start to finish, they are hard to find. However the focus here isn’t on being a multi-skilled individual; instead, it’s about being part of a high-performing cross-functional team.

So how do you become a contributing member of such a team? More importantly, how do you foster an environment where everyone feels empowered to speak up and participate fully?

Deniz Uludağ, one of the advisors of oNabu, highlighted the importance of creating a roadmap for empowering Speak-Up Culture. As leaders, it’s crucial to understand how to nurture such a culture.

What is Speak-Up Culture?

Speak Up Culture is the key ingredient for high performance teams and learning organisations. It is a social climate where people can ask questions, share their ideas, concerns and mistakes without fear of humiliation, and/or punishment. People feel included, safe to learn, safe to contribute and safe the challenge the status quo.

Speak Up Culture does not mean we can say whatever we like in a way we prefer. Speak up Culture necessitates Radical Candor in which we challenge directly while we care for people. This is the culture that creates a learning organization for innovation and growth.

Amy.C.Edmondson (2019) The Fearless Organisation & Scott.K (2017) Radical Candor

Why Does it Matter?

Google has made a research called Project Aristotle, including 180 teams and 37000 people to understand what makes a perfect high performance team over a span of 2 years. As Google is good at finding through data, they did not find a common pattern until they focus on psychological safety, inspired by the Amy. C Edmondson’s Work published in 1999.

Google has obtained the same result as Amy C. Edmondson. Of course, there were some other indicators of a high performance team but psychological safety was in the first place.

Patrick Lencioni, spoke about the same ingredients but according to his observations of dysfunctions. In his book, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, he clearly explains that lack of trust causes fear of conflict, and in order results in lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

It is important to observe teams, and hear what is said and beyond. If some of these are your observations in Agile events and when you are with teams:

  • Deep silence,
  • Mostly one or two people speaking up and lack of discussions about different ideas,
  • Errors not visible or not discussed,
  • Fake positive atmosphere altogether but gossiping behind the scene,
  • People complaining about others but not giving feedback to each other,
  • Not at all risk taking, preference to stay in comfort zone,
  • Too much impression management and politics,
  • Blaming, Drama triangles….
  • People are unhappy and not motivated,
  • etc.

It is time to invest in Speak Up Culture. Because these behaviors are obstacles to high performance teams.

You can see the “How?” section which offers ready-to-use artifacts you can easily apply with oNabu Subscription.

To prepare a Speak Up Culture roadmap, you need to focus on Teams and Leaders and the Organisation. Speak Up Culture flourishes firstly in team level and supported at organisational level. In an organisation, there may be variant levels of psychological safety at different teams. Your steps to construct a Speak Up Culture Roadmap will be: