#program increment

What is an OKR?

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a simple management and planning method that helps organizations define and accomplish their goals. It is a framework that helps in achieving tasks in the shortest time possible by coordinating the teams and their leaders on to one direction to obtain their goals.

How did it come about?

This framework originated in the 1970’s. But it was promoted by John Doerr during his time at Google. It wasn’t until the idea spread through out Silicon Valley that major companies like LinkedIn, Twitter, Spotify and AirBnB started following the same method.  OKR was not just meant for tech companies to embrace but many companies like Walmart, Target, The Guardian and ING Bank have also followed suit.

How to make OKRs?

PI objectives are a set of directives that are summarized to describe the technical and business elements of a goal that needs to be achieved by an agile team or an agile release train. They serve the basis of planning and aligning the outcomes of a program increment.

PI objectives help to give a clear understanding of what needs to be done. With that being said, the information described in the PI objectives is effectively communicated to business owners or stakeholders, which also educates them on what will be made and in a way that it also validates the team’s grasp on the matter.

A lot of work goes into correctly mapping the objectives out. In this article, we have broken down the process of creating smart PI objectives into three simple steps.

1. Planning your Objectives

Every agile team should have at least one PI objective to cover. But to start formulating these objectives, you need to ask yourself:

What and why do you want to achieve your goal in the PI?

How will you achieve what you want in this PI?

To answer all of these questions, you need to have a staunch understanding of the vision and the scope of your project. Teams need to possess an in-depth knowledge and an understanding of the teams, their velocities, competencies, milestones, and its dependencies. This helps in analyzing and doing relevant estimations of the upcoming stories. A time limit should be set for when the objective can be achieved.

The PI objectives should draw focus towards helping the user or the business owner implement a feature. It should be planned in such a way that you get feedback as early as possible so changes can be made in time so that it reduces costs and risks in the future.

2. Creation of your Objectives

Once the planning is done, these PI objectives need to be summarized down into statements that address both the technical and the business aspect of what needs to be done.

The information presented in these statements needs to be specific, clear and concise. A good practice to ensure that the objectives are correct is to apply SMART rules. SMART is abbreviated as Specific and Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Their rules are described as follows:

Specific and Measurable – They need to be supported by reasonable estimation thereby distinctly describing or quantifying what needs to be achieved. Feedback from stakeholders is important to guarantee success.

Attainable – It should be realistic, free of any ambiguity and should explain the matter as explicitly as possible.

Relevant – The PI objectives need to be aligned with the vision and the product backlog.

Time-Bound – Set a time limit to achieve the objective.

An Example of an unclear objective:

Improve Performance.

An Example of a Clear Objective:

Increase page load time by x% so the customers experience less frustration.

3. Assigning Business Value

With the PI objectives made, the final step is to get a business value assigned. This is assigned by business owners during the PI planning session. Business owners assign a value from 1 being the lowest, to 10 being the highest. These values determine the priority or the severity with which the objectives need to be done.

Having PI objectives give direction to your project. It enhances transparency and visibility into the entire project by coordinating everyone to the same mission. Not all of the PI objectives are completed in a program increment.

The objectives that are not met in a program increment, are re-evaluated from where they are either removed or moved up the backlog for the upcoming program increment. This not only reduces excess WIP but also ensures continuous improvement.

About Kendis

You can create custom or team PI objectives in Kendis that will help you in aligning and coordinating all the goals that your agile teams wish to achieve.

Continuous delivery is deploying software product incrementally with new features as continuously and frequently as needed. It consists of processes and workflows that reduce cost and improve speed, quality and reliability of the software product.

One of the milestones in implementing Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is to plan a successful Program Increment (PI). This also includes the transparent tracking of committed features and user stories by each team. All of this can be achieved by using a dynamic SAFe tool. To avoid any setbacks, IT and Infrastructure team must participate in these PI sessions and get environments ready accordingly to satisfy the solution and schedule needs.

Agile at heart, continuous delivery allows you to seamlessly encounter new requirements and build software with the desired changes and deploy it. Thus this ensures a consistent and an updated flow of changes into production. The releases can be made hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. It depends on your needs and demand. Nevertheless the ultimate goal is to provide value consistently.

Famous technology leaders including Google, Amazon, Netflix, Etsy, and Facebook are able to deploy changes within minutes using a smooth delivery pipeline.

Solution train builds complex solution with a Lean-Agile approach. It organizes and coordinates multiple Agile Release Trains into one. It guides the focus of hundreds or even thousands of individuals towards achieving a common mission. This is planned for creating solutions on a large scale. Solution trains are widely used for the development of medical devices, automobiles, aircraft or banking systems.

HOW IS THE SOLUTION TRAIN PLANNED?

A solution train starts like a conventional SAFe Program Increment Planning session. But instead of having Agile Teams that become a part of the Agile Release Train, there are Agile Release Trains that participate. The vision and the backlog are aligned. The dates are decided for the cadence and the schedule to follow. The planning of the budget is done according to an Economic Framework. This framework consists of lean budgets, epic funding, decentralized planning and job sequencing. The Economic Framework effectively arranges the team to complete its business objectives by considering the business constraints and staying within the set budget.

There are regulatory standards that the solution has to comply with. These standards are concerned with building high quality solutions with Lean and Agile practices. The Solution Kanban helps in managing the epics and limits the WIP (Work In Process). The capabilities are analyzed and become part of the Solution Backlog from where features are then implemented. Finally, all the Agile Release Trains are coordinated to form the solution train.

Model-Based Systems Engineering is a technique that provides flexibility in defining the solution. It describes how the design of the solution can be developed, documented and maintained. Every solution has an intent and context. The intent depicts the behavior of the solution whereas the context describes how the solution fits in the deployment environment.