OKR is Agile For Strategy Execution
Many company leaders have struggled to spend enough time focusing on medium- and long-term strategic issues, especially during the COVID-19 Pandemic, which requires undivided attention. This lack of focus has the potential to derail companies for an entire quarter – even a year – if they don’t begin to focus their attention on other issues at hand. The question is – how can leaders implement methodologies to motivate and align teams across an organization?
The Chasm Between Strategy and Execution
The chasm between strategy and execution exists for several reasons, those being a lack of alignment, lack of accountability, too many priorities, and the front line of companies not realizing how their work directly contributes to the company. Due to these and other reasons, there is a great chasm between strategy and execution.
Unrealistic Goals
One of the major roadblocks between strategy and execution is the goals. More often than not, goals set up by the company are too ambitious to achieve that the teams do not feel any motivation to complete them. They assume that the set goals are unrealistic, and they do not put in the required effort.
Solution
Inspirational Objectives
Stating clear directions for every individual is essential. It ensures that all your employees are aware of the company goals and work together to achieve them.
Aggressive Yet Realistic Key Results
Key Results should be aggressive yet realistic. If you set too ambitious goals, the team will lose the motivation to achieve them. If you set them too low, they will too easy to achieve, thus defeating the entire purpose of setting up an OKR.
Close The Alignment Gap
Agile OKRs ensure that there is a minimum alignment gap between strategy and execution. Goals are communicated with the entire team, and regular meetings are conducted to clear any queries and track the progress. This ensures that everyone on the team is on the same page and works in harmony to deliver what is needed.
Four Ways Agile Can Help
Create Value
Agile ensures that your OKRs function the way you expect them to be. This way, it delivers the needed value. It helps you meet objectives and highlights the key results while ensuring that your teams are on track every time.
Create Agile Teams
Agile methodology helps you create agile teams that are willing to adapt and adjust as the case might be. When your OKR doesn’t progress the way you want it to be, agile teams are willing to go the extra mile to handle the challenges and meet the set goals.
Outline Requirements
Agile is a transparent methodology of achieving things. It keeps everyone involved in the organization on the same page in terms of set objectives and helps you achieve them. This way, the entire team has a clear idea of what is needed.
Develop A Roadmap
Agile helps you develop a clear roadmap for every step that your team can follow and refer to when stuck anywhere.
How OKR Compliments Agile
OKR Creates Discipline
As OKR makes it easy to track your progress every OKR and if you had been successful or not, it develops discipline within the teams. They work hard to deliver the best results, and this ensures that the company is progressing no matter what.
OKR Enables Self-Organizing Teams
OKR defines a clear goal for every team and individual. Every employee in the organization is aware of their objectives and how their output will affect the company in the long run. This makes them self-sufficient and self-organizing.
OKR Connects A Team With Its Business
Amid the pressure to meet the deadlines and develop citing products, it is easy for teams to get lost in complicated technicalities. However, OKR prevents this from happening by following a bottom-up approach. Your teams get an opportunity to communicate with the higher-ups and get answers to why they are doing what they are doing.
Develop A Roadmap
Although agile is known for the features a product delivers, OKR ensures that the added features provide value to the end product. As necessary it is to introduce new features, it is equally essential to ensure that the added features impact the desired business results positively.
Conclusion
As you can see, OKRs are agile, and this helps in flawless strategy execution. Agility ensures you are aware of the progress at each stage, which makes tracking the set milestones easier and effective.
If you want to incorporate OKR in your organization on the lines of agile methodology, People Stretch Solutions is here to help you out. Contact us today to learn more.
