Shared OKR for Q4
Situation
Last quarter, I made the objective for the team and rolled down to individual objectives due to reduced working hours and 1st time roll over the OKR in the team. Everyone worked isolately to complete individual obejctives, which was quite difficult to keep everyone engaged and up to date with the progress as some individual objectives were abandon as other things jumped into the pipeline, or others were sandbags.
Hence, for Quarter 4, my focus to test is on how I can keep everyone engaged and up to date with the progress.
To kick off the Q4 OKR planning, 2 weeks before Sep finished, Team had discussion on Q4 OKR to work out what really matters to us in this quarter.
Complication
Within the team discussion, 7 items were contributed to the discussion. Also, instead of having individual objectives, tried to only have one shared OKR and have everyone aligned to it. After 1-hour discussion, the team had a consensus on 1 item to be focus on which were about cross-training and documentated critical activities. This is more as action instead of objective from my view.
However, we ran out of time for further discussion to pick up the words for objective, at least the direction was set.
Answer/Action
After the month-end week, in the 1st Monday check-ins, instead of checking the progress (actually, no progress due to the past-2-week peak time for month-end closing. — which is also a chellenge in OKR as it always stops the progress) , in Daily catchup meeting, I initiated the continuous discussion on the objective and key results setting in order to build the roadmap for the progress in this week.
“What is our question? ”
Our objective is to have Process Excellence to satisfy customer even while process owner is absence, and to have sustianble workload as well.
The current issue/concern is the process is disrupted while the process owner is absence and the workload to pick up after the owner is returned is not sustainable.
The solution is to have a backup system to maintain our process at the excellence level while process owner is absence.
=> what does it really mean then? what the success looks like for the team?
Team discussion to analyse the question
Within 30 minutes:
I asked everyone to think about what is the dicussion we had last time and then asked them to think about
- what does it really mean to us?
- what a success backup system looks like for the team and what it helps us?
- if we had such system setup, what does it include?
- how do we know we had such a system?
The team
- started with a silence (I had to keep myself not talking but asking more questions as above. it was really hard to stop the motivation to break the silence or feeling embrassing or thinking if the team would feel it is waste of time if the silence continues)
- picked up from last discussion: cross training and documented critical process
- the more they talked about, the more ideas came(brain storming): trial-run and testing in live, feedback session; system access structured; backup owners nominated and structured; directory for process documentation.
- then, question raised in the team: how do we know which is critical activity? is it critical to our job or critical to the business.
- Team’s answer: 1st criteria: it is critical to our job with assessment by answering the question: if you were sick/away for 1–2 weeks, how you can make the work easier to pick up while you are back to work.
Solution
In a summary: a backup system operates when it includes
- the scope
- the people
- the IT system
- the training
- the testing
- the material
Next step
Tomorrow: Tuesday = Monday check-ins meeting
- Everyone to identify the critical activity in their own job
- Finalise the OKR for Q4
- Draw the roadmap for Q4, especially for this week
- To talk about the upcoming week: on where the confidence scale we are currently at and why; important upcoming events — any re-priorities needed?
- Email status report
Friday Wins meeting at daily catchup
with no specific agenda, only ask：
- if someone wants to share some kind of win from the past week with the rest of us.
- to talk about what we have accomplished, not what we are going to.
- it doesn’t have to be anything big or special, as long as it’s a win.
Not an official meeting;
To create a feeling that we are all in this together
Time to thank everyone for the past week and wish everyone a nice weekend.
Final words
- Be comfortable to keep quite in disuccsion. sometime it just needs a couple of minutes for people to think about. The more the people talk, the better the engagement and invovlement of the dicussion would be, and the more others would invovled too.
- Don’t need to come to a self-set OKR for the team before the discussion from you. With everyone’s invovlement, the OKR is better than the self-set one. Also, in the dicussion, you won’t be in a position to critize if the team is talking about what your thought was or close to. — less critized but more listened.
- Keep things super-simple at first. If it is too complex, everyone simple won’t do it or will abandon it very quickly.
- To keep it simple, dicuss one thing/change one approach at a time. so everyone can focus on discussion in one thing which, would be easier to have consensus, instead of focus on lots of excuses or constraints.
Reference:
“OKR Journey — Meetings”: https://medium.com/we-are-ingrid/okr-journey-meetings-56e0df3fa948
“OKR Journey — Planning”: https://medium.com/we-are-ingrid/okr-journey-planning-c66f15e1311c
