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Why Should Software Development and Delivery Teams Care About OKRs and VSM?

In ConnectALL, OKR, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

Should software development teams bother about Objectives and Key Results (OKR), or is it just a fancy term for another performance evaluation metric?  Let’s clear this right away: the OKR approach is not task or to-do checklists, or performance evaluations; it is not the same as software development KPIs or MBOs, and it definitely is not a project management target.  Despite the perception that executives are the only ones who should worry about OKRs, a well-planned and strategically written OKR — when tied to business outcomes — will have an impact on software development teams. Why? Because an OKR approach …

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How VSM Can Help You Steer Clear of These Six OKR Mistakes

In ConnectALL, OKR, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

In 2020, when a majority of the workforce switched to remote working, organizations of all sizes across the globe turned to Objective Key Results (OKR) to figure out how to stay aligned while responding to rapid change in the business environment.  OKRs, as you may know already, are a great way to attain audacious goals. This is because setting OKRs forces individuals, teams, and companies to articulate their goals in a time-bound and measurable fashion. By setting an Objective (a broad mission statement) and several Key Results (shorter, measurable assignments) great strides can be made in a quick and organized …

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Three Simple Strategies to Create Effective OKRs for Software Delivery Value Streams

In OKR, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

How did Google grow from 40 employees to 139,995 and over $257 billion in global revenue? Sure, Google’s unique and ubiquitous products and services play a huge role. But they also have a covert yet overt strategy in their back pocket: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The OKR methodology was originally conceptualized by the legendary Andy Grove from Intel and Google adopted it in 1999 in its very first year of inception. Subsequently, OKRs spread across Silicon Valley companies. Recognized as a collaborative goal-setting system, today a lot of companies like Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Airbnb use OKRs. But OKRs …

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How to monitor business goals with value stream management

In OKR, Value Stream Management by Lance Knight

Even as organizations and their teams work to stay abreast of meaningful improvement practices, many are still missing a big piece of the puzzle—tying software initiatives to business outcomes. Software system optimization from a technical perspective is a worthwhile accomplishment overall, but benchmarking its value can be elusive. This is problematic, since these efforts must further business objectives for corporate executives (and bean counters) to quantify the bottom-line value. How can management substantiate the assertion that software improvement promotes desired business outcomes? By incorporating objectives and key results (OKRs).