When strategic planning is the subject, different approaches can come to our minds and lead us to many practices for better understanding business needs and consider what is necessary to deliver the results that are being expected.
During many years executives and leaders have being improving the way to go through the challanges of the strategic planning and creating different models that better fit into a context or a organizational scenario.
A little bit of history!
In the early 1920s, Alfred Sloan presented an approach in which decisions were decentralized and based on different contexts for each of the General Motors Company’s organizational structures. This approach was applied by Pierre du Pont in his company, Du Pont, where different departments were created in a new organizational structure, allowing a greater level of autonomy for decision-making by the leaders and the focus on strategic planning by the directors and executives.
Later on 50's, Peter Druker developed the Management By Objectives (MBO), a approach that brings balance between the expectations and objectives for employees and the organization. The focus of MBO is to understand and set the joints for the objectives and to provide feedback based on the results.
On late 60’s, Andy Grove evolved the concept of MOB to the Objective and Key Results model and start disseminating the practices while working for Intel. During the 70's, John Doerr worked for Intel and learned the concepts of that working model to, later on late 90’s, introduce the OKRs approach in one of the biggest companys that we have nowadays, Google.
The use of OKRs became more popular after the application of the model and the results obtained by Google, making the approach known worldwide and more popular. On 2017 John Doerr publishes his book, Measure What Matters, a trigger to make this approach even more adopted by different companys around the world.
Wow! OKRs sounds perfect, but is there a way to improve it’s usage?
During my professional life I had some great opportunities to help organizations and teams to define their Objectives and Key Results, always creating a close link to the business strategy.
After some years practicing and getting involved in facilitations for many different markets, I came with a question “is there a way to improve the usage of OKRs?”
While working for one of the major banks in Brazil, Edson Naves, a good friend of mine came with the idea of using the Balanced Score Cards perspectives to make more tangible the results that the objectives and the key results would affect. Based on this suggestion we started to make some experiments and combined the use of BSC perspectives and the OKRs defined by leaders, teams and organizations.
The result of this initiative was really impressive as the involved ones began to better understand in wich aspect of the organizational strategy the OKRs would impact, such as customer, financial, learning and growth and internal business process.
As people started knowing where the actions would reflect, it came to be much more tangible for every one to understand the strategy plan, how it would break into areas initiatives and how teams could cooperate for each one of them.
Another tool that helps to keep track of the plan!
Defining a strategy plan based on Objectives and Key Results for the different levels of the organization is a very well recommended practice, but with so many different areas and levels, how to keep track of all the initiatives that are being taken in order to accomplish the objectives in all levels?
During my years of experiments I combined a tool very well used in predictive projects that helps project managers to follow the scope plan during the whole project. This tool is the work breakdown structure, or simply WBS.
Nowadays talking about predictive project tools seems a little “démodé”, but in my opinion there a lot of usefull tools described in the variuos versions of PMBok, and one of those is the WBS.
Using the WBS to keep track of the Objectives and Key Results is quite simple. It works as an hierarchy chart where the strategic objectives stay in the top, as a the project name in the regular WBS, and the results defined stays right below in separeted slots.
Below the Key Results, the defined initiatives are described in the proper slots for each KR, enabling the easy tracking of the work necessary to deliver each of the expected results.
The initiatives, in turn, are drilled down into epics that compose the backlog with it’s requirements, tasks, stories and so on.
The way to create this structure can vary from software to software, person to person and the different needs, but the main idea is to help organizations, leaders and teams to better follow the day-by-day job in order to respond to any change in the plan.
Of course that this is not the answer to all the difficulties and issues regarding the strategic plan and the use of OKRs, but the main intent of this article was to share how some expereiments and good approaches that I have being taking that worked for me and might help you to follow up of the actions taken when working in different contexts.
If you liked and already experimented, please leave your comment and share your experience.
Best Regards.
