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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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How VSM and OKRs Complement Each Other to Drive Business Value

In Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

Organizations that are constantly trying to scale their Lean and Agile practices and strategies to increase agility have to evolve the way progress is measured. In this blog, we discuss about how lean practices like Value Stream Management OKR complement each other to help organizations, especially the ones that are in a scaled-agile environment, achieve the larger goal of business outcomes, improving agility and velocity, becoming more predictable by delivering value, and focusing on what matters.

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Objectives and Key Results: Not Just a Means to an End for Businesses

In OKR, Value Stream, Value Stream Management by Soumya Menon

OKR is an approach that organizations of varying sizes use to measure the ongoing health of their processes and align efforts up and down the organizational hierarchy around important improvement opportunities. You might think OKR is a relatively new approach; however, it has been around for decades. The truth of the matter is that scaling Lean-Agile practices requires organizations to evolve the way progress is measured. So instead of focusing only on completion of projects, OKRs help organizations set goals in a trackable manner — tying your project goals to business objectives and measuring the results against the overall objective.