Tell me OKR, KPI, and Agility without telling me. That sounds like a GPT prompt for 4 panel-strips. Let’s illustrate using road trip on a car.
Find home next to a waterfall may become the inspirational objective of OKR[1] and visiting 5 waterfalls up north as one of the key results. As we drive along the way, the machine temperature and gas gauge needle are indicators on how well we’re going. We want to prevent machine overheat (50% to H) and empty fuel tank (25% before E) as KPI.
After starting the engine, turning on the headlights[2] allows you just-enough anticipation (read: responding to change[3]) for curves ahead, bump, up to possible detour (read: reflect at regular interval). That’s agility in value and principle. When we invert the triangle locking time as fix (letting scope and cost to find balance): we drive as far as possible[4] making sure that we arrive at the best finish guided by OKR (stick with 5 waterfalls). Why best? OKR excels at focus, discipline to say “no” when it’s tempting to add more priorities. That sounds very much maximizing the work not done[3]. Even the five questions checking-in OKR sounded like the legacy three questions of daily scrum with one saying, “Is there anything impeding your work?”[1]
It’s a good to remember that in goal setting evolution, KPI had been the status quo metric tied to salary or bonus that OKR was trying to divorce from. In this driving example, KPI has no trouble helping the driver running business as usual, but in the case of aiming for ambitious destinations, OKR is the new norm of framework as evangelized by the giants (Intel, Google).
References
[1] J. Doerr, Measure what matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. Penguin, 2018.
[2] G. Dinwiddie, Software estimation without guessing: Effective Planning in an Imperfect World. Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2019.
[3] “Manifesto for Agile software development.” https://agilemanifesto.org/
[4] M. Cohn, Agile estimating and planning. Pearson Education, 2005.
