Agile Games New England Program, April 8-10

"You can motivate by fear, and you can motivate by reward. But both those methods are only temporary. The only lasting thing is self-motivation." - Homer Rice

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have been well known for decades now, and John Doerr's book on Measuring What Matters became a hit immediately after it was published. However, while OKRs as a concept seems logical and straightforward, many companies struggle with implementing this concept in an aligned and inspirational way. As an Agile coach implementing OKRs in multiple large organizations, I experience three major anti-patterns:

Anti-pattern: Implementing OKRs top-down. OKRs are not KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) which are top-down arbitrary numbers provided by management to each employee at the beginning of a long-term period (usually a year). OKRs are set by teams, not individuals, and aligned with organizational objectives. In that, OKRs are inspirational and encourage teams to set up the objectives that motivate them and inspire self-organizing teams to make a difference.

Anti-pattern: Using OKRs to measure performance and define compensation. Unlike KPIs which are used to measure performance and influence compensation and promotions, OKRs should not be not related to performance in any way. Numbers are easy to game, and connecting OKRs to performance would negate their purpose. OKRs need to be aspirational and hard to achieve, so that teams challenge themselves to continuously grow and become high-performing. This is the reason OKRs are self-graded, not measured by managers.

Anti-pattern: Focusing OKRs on activities, not results. Frequently, OKRs are focused on activities or tasks, e.g. provide 100 training sessions, hire 300 employees, create a Playbook covering 50 topics. While sometimes there is a reason for task-based key results, in most cases, the objective is either customer-related (e.g. customer satisfaction), business objective (e.g. revenue growth), employee-related (e.g. retention data), or a related goal. In either case, it forces teams to pivot if the initial set of activities does not bring the intended result and fail forward to pursue the goal. (OKR example

During the workshop, we will be playing two OKR-setting games. The goal of these games is to experience in practice how to avoid common mistakes and set up cascading OKRs bottom-up by empowering teams, aligning divisions, and keeping the organizational objectives in focus - all of this while keeping employees motivated and inspired. Finally, we will discuss how OKRs empower teams to self-organize while achieving shared goals within a scaled agile environment.

For an explanation of the Agile Fluency Game, see here: https://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Agile-Fluency-Game-Now-Available.html

For an explanation of the Agile Fluency Game, see here: https://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Agile-Fluency-Game-Now-Available.html

Giving and receiving feedback are essential skills for both Agile managers and practitioners. The Perfection Game, part of the Core Protocols, provides a painless framework for having difficult conversations. Come play the Perfection Game to practice this skill and get feedback from other players who will also use the Perfection Game.

Metrics and KPIs can be difficult to craft. Setting appropriate baselines, targets, and guardbands requires both deep knowledge of the thing to be measured AND an understanding of the use and potential misuse of Metrics. In this conversation we'll example some common pitfalls in crafting metrics and build at least one metric that our teams' can use to drive goals forward.

Do you think concepts such as psychological safety, teamwork, and emotional assertiveness are luxuries? Do you believe teams can produce the same results regardless of their psychological safety? Do you suppose that these concepts are overrated and managers shouldn't worry about them because employees will have relatively same level of productivity anyway? Then you should attend this workshop.

We will play two rounds of a wireframe development game and you will see how the presence and absence of psychological safety can alter the end results and bottom lines. Depending on cultural values, how the teams are set up, and the way senior managers treat and reward people, they will feel psychologically safe, not safe, or worse, threatened. They will behave differently, express their opinions differently, and collaborate differently. The teams will function differently and the product they make will look like significantly different.

Join the workshop and experience it firsthand. This workshop will help Agilists, coaches, and managers to experience the cause and effect relationship between psychological safety and productivity of teams.

Agile release planning provides a high-level summary timeline of the release schedule based on the product roadmap and the product vision for the product's evolution. It allows the product team to decide how much needs to be developed and how long it will take to have a releasable product based on business goals. Since features represent value to the customer, it is crucial that we prioritize their release in order of highest to lowest business value. Often this poses a challenge because people in various roles prioritize differently. In this session, individuals will work in teams to prioritize hypothetical user stories according to the business value of the given scenario. Individuals will leave this session with a game/technique to efficiently prioritize backlogs according to value, with input from the entire team.