Can you keep Agile and OKRs seperate?

“I’ve been told to keep agile and OKRs separate”

The first time I head this I was surprised, “missed opportunity” I thought but then, as I thought about it more, the more I realised that it was impossible.

Start with the OKRs: OKRs are about deciding what to put your time and energy into. OKRs are about the big priorities for your organization and team. The more I’ve spent time with OKRs, the more I’ve come to see them as the management method rather than a management method among many. Let me caveat that lest it sound arrogate: management within an organization.

The management approach

There are many management approaches out there: strict time-and-motion were workers time is schedule to the minute by experts; complete devolution giving employees free rein and managers (if they exist at all) only exist to coach. And there is everything in between, including project management which attempts to define the start and stop dates in advance. At this level OKRs are one management approach among many and organizations are free to choose which they follow.

Even combining traditional HR performance review processes with OKRs can lead to ruin. Once compensation is conected to OKRs people become incentivised to stay safe by setting OKRs which bring rewards, i.e. not ambitions ones that might be missed.

Running any other management method in tandem with OKRs risks jeopardising both. So if you choose OKR then follow it all the way, call it “Extreme OKRs” if you like.

Just try imaging agile as something separate to your OKRs: you set OKRs and then you run iterations. What are you delivering in the iteration? Surely iterations are delivering progress against OKRs?

I suppose you could have a backlog of work to do (Track A) and some OKRs to work on as well (Track B). Track A and B might lead to different places or represent different work to do. Leave aside potential conflict for a minute, think about how you divide your time.

More WIP, fewer results

Agile teaches that work in progress should be minimised, but now in this example there are two sanctioned work streams. Maybe we could ring-fence work: Agile in the morning, OKRs in the afternoon. I find it hard to see that working well.

Maybe A could be the main stream and B other a “best efforts” / “spare time” stream. But, if both A and B are important then why leave prioritisation be left to the worker? It smells a bit of leadership abdicating responsibility for prioritisation.

It is a fantasy to think that workers can focus on delivering the backlog and in their “spare time” deliver the OKRs. If your workers have copious amounts of spare time then something else is seriously wrong. It is easy to overload workers, and thereby create problems further down the line. People will burn out, goals will be missed or goals are met but with such poor quality that problems emerge later.

I can see how you can run OKRs without agile.

And I’ve long seen Agile working without OKRs.

But if you have both Agile and OKRs in the same company I just don’t see how Agile and OKRs can be separated. Conversely I can see how they can work well together – yes, I wrote a book on that.

If you are going to have OKRs and Agile in the same company then you need to consider them as one thing, not as two separate endeavours.

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash


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