Last night, my wife, son, daughter and I watched the movie, Frozen II.
We had a great time; the movie theatre was nice (gigantic screen–IMAX; huge reclining lounge chairs; fresh popcorns; refreshing water) and the movie was great!
There is a line in the movie that I immediately correlated to lean agile; Elsa to Anna: ‘ There are two sides of a bridge…’
My correlation of that line to lean agile is this:
Side #1) intent. Give intent; not instructions. This will be more meaningful to people… they get to perform something in their own way.
Let your people think!
‘Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.‘ — General George S. Patton
This is essentially to let your people do their best work… for them to think creatively… not mindlessly follow instructions.
Side #2) Results and progress. Results is the name of the game. Focus on results.
This is when performance and progress are measured by results.
Beware of ‘features’ and ‘stories’ factories… where progress is measured heavily on velocity, output or throughput… and lightly — if at all — measured on the achievement of the intent… the results.
Fact is, Teams can release as many stories and features as possible but if these don’t solve for anything…or no value at all… then what’s the effort for?
Released stories and features must align to business priorities. High value items are prioritized highly by the business.
We should be advancing/progressing towards set objectives and goals.
How can we put these two aforementioned sides together? We need a bridge.
A bridge that leads us on how to meaningfully measure results and progress.
This bridge is called OKRs — Objectives and Key Results.
Bridging these two sides together, with OKRs, is paramount.
More on OKRs and these two sides in coming posts!
