5 ms·

I really don’t understand people who are interested in things like OKRs.

by 4pkjai 3y ago

darkerside 3y ago
Ever hear someone complain about big company bureaucracy? The bigger an organization gets, the more impossible it gets to manage it and keep people aligned towards effective and compounding goals. OKRs promise to help improve that impossible process. I'm not surprised at all that people are interested.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  OKRs can in theory make sense but they create a new kind of tension. Because they compete with the BAU work, the niggly things that come up mid quarter that you need to get done. Individuals need to resolve the dilemma, do what has to be done, or do what makes me look good. I think a new thing is needed at least for smaller teams. Something like adaptive goals. Roadmap a year, vaguely and plan the next 6 weeks. Measure stuff where it makes sense but not everything needs a measure (or things that don’t might be 0 or 1). Plan based on velocity that takes into account that you wont have planned everything. Measures are useful but also bullshit. There is no correlation between the measure and business success without intelligence. Even revenue is not a measure of success (I could sell half price bitcoins and have a lot of revenue!)
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    The existence of bad measures doesn't preclude the possibility of good ones, even though they won't be perfect. BAU activities, e.g. devops, can be measured in useful ways[0] as well. [0] https://dora.dev https://dora.dev
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Oh yes. But intelligence needs to be applied. OKRs turn measures into something like a sport, like soccer where those measure become the goal (beat the KR and get a bonus, or even just pressure on the KR and nothing else).
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        > But intelligence needs to be applied I think this is an almost universal caveat. > OKRs turn measures into something like a sport No, I don't think that's true. People might do that, but they also do that to things that aren't OKRs. It's great to critique OKRs, but not by comparing them to a hypothetical perfect world.
  - patrickmay 3y ago
    BAU work should be covered in resource planning, not OKRs. The amount of time available to work on KRs should never be 100% -- it should be in the range of 60-70% to account for overhead, trainings, vacations, and unexpected issues that must be addressed.
- pvdoom 3y ago
  Kinda disagree. All the times I have seen OKRs implemented has been as part of a "transition to agile" with several other measures, and often what happens is they get slapped on top or replace other measures, without doing anything real for fixing company bureaucracy. You need much more fundamental changes to fix that, and that would involve pissing off a lot of people with a lot of power.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > OKRs promise to help improve that impossible process. You mean like Google devs who kill projects faster than they roll them out
- darkerside 3y ago
  A lot of people are mistaking my explanation for why people are interested in OKRs for an endorsement of OKRs. I think having goals is good, understanding how they type into the broader company mission is good, but being able to adapt is also good. OKRs:goal-setting::Scrum:agile
koliber 3y ago
OKRs are a goal setting framework for non-trivial 3-12 month goals. Some people are self motivated and well organized, are great at communicating progress proactively to other stakeholders, an understand the idea of cross departmental alignment. OKRs will not help them. For everyone else, OKRs are a tool that can help accomplish those things. PS I actually like OKRs and after a lot of effort, learned how to make them useful. I did not get it at first either.
- ninkendo 3y ago
  The problem for me is the “key results” part of OKR’s. It means that if it’s not measurable, it’s not an OKR, and in too many organizations, if it’s not an OKR it’s not worth doing. Cleaning up your code base to accommodate all the gradual accumulation of small fixes/hacks is not something you can put a metric on, at least not without pulling numbers out of your ass. But everyone agrees that you can’t really have quality software without doing this. But OKR’s would say that making nothing but tactical changes to ship features and never revisiting architecture is perfectly great. The incentives always seem to push you towards tech debt. OKR proponents would say that revisiting architecture and paying down tech debt should be implicit and part of the process of achieving your results, but I’ve never seen it done. Or rather the only time I have seen it done is when someone tries to shoehorn the refactoring work into an OKR in order to justify it, making up bogus metrics, getting the OKR dropped because it’s not meaningful enough, and then just working on it anyway.
  - mgburns 3y ago
    "Cleaning up your code base to accommodate all the gradual accumulation of small fixes/hacks is not something you can put a metric on" - why not? generally the need to refactor is driven by something - getting too hard to make changes? productivity down? introducing more errors then we used to? In those cases improving productivity or reducing errors is the result we're targeting, and cleaning the code is the activity we do to achieve the result.
    - ninkendo 3y ago
pvdoom 3y ago
To me its not OKRs specifically but organisations in general - what is an organisation and how does it actually work (as opposed to what we tell ourselves), and that includes the frameworks and processes we use. OKRs are interesting then because they are a specific framework that maybe, or maybe not works. But people getting obsessed about OKRs in particular and making them "fun" are completely missing the bigger picture and the purpose of metrics, as tools of control and stuff...
cust 3y ago
[dead]
knallfrosch 3y ago
Feels like people start by wanting to do good work, then they need to invent an objective retroactively. Add external accountability and meetings, et voilà!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
epolanski 3y ago
When my previous company introduced them I pointed out that despite several studies, not one could conclude that OKRs had any positive effect and that the only famous "success" case, Google, didn't prove at all that Google was successful due to them but arguably, despite them. Let's just say that I didn't won any popularity awards there for being the rational one.
- alexterrien 3y ago
  Could you link to the studies you mention here?
ekianjo 3y ago
Googlers probably?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

I really don’t understand people who are interested in things like OKRs.

by 4pkjai 3y ago

I really don’t understand people who are interested in things like OKRs.

Ever hear someone complain about big company bureaucracy? The bigger an organization gets, the more impossible it gets to manage it and keep people aligned towards effective and compounding goals. OKRs promise to help improve that impossible process. I'm not surprised at all that people are interested.

quickthrower2 3y ago
OKRs can in theory make sense but they create a new kind of tension. Because they compete with the BAU work, the niggly things that come up mid quarter that you need to get done. Individuals need to resolve the dilemma, do what has to be done, or do what makes me look good. I think a new thing is needed at least for smaller teams. Something like adaptive goals. Roadmap a year, vaguely and plan the next 6 weeks. Measure stuff where it makes sense but not everything needs a measure (or things that don’t might be 0 or 1). Plan based on velocity that takes into account that you wont have planned everything. Measures are useful but also bullshit. There is no correlation between the measure and business success without intelligence. Even revenue is not a measure of success (I could sell half price bitcoins and have a lot of revenue!)
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  The existence of bad measures doesn't preclude the possibility of good ones, even though they won't be perfect. BAU activities, e.g. devops, can be measured in useful ways[0] as well. [0] https://dora.dev https://dora.dev
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Oh yes. But intelligence needs to be applied. OKRs turn measures into something like a sport, like soccer where those measure become the goal (beat the KR and get a bonus, or even just pressure on the KR and nothing else).
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > But intelligence needs to be applied I think this is an almost universal caveat. > OKRs turn measures into something like a sport No, I don't think that's true. People might do that, but they also do that to things that aren't OKRs. It's great to critique OKRs, but not by comparing them to a hypothetical perfect world.
- patrickmay 3y ago
  BAU work should be covered in resource planning, not OKRs. The amount of time available to work on KRs should never be 100% -- it should be in the range of 60-70% to account for overhead, trainings, vacations, and unexpected issues that must be addressed.
pvdoom 3y ago
Kinda disagree. All the times I have seen OKRs implemented has been as part of a "transition to agile" with several other measures, and often what happens is they get slapped on top or replace other measures, without doing anything real for fixing company bureaucracy. You need much more fundamental changes to fix that, and that would involve pissing off a lot of people with a lot of power.
ekianjo 3y ago
> OKRs promise to help improve that impossible process. You mean like Google devs who kill projects faster than they roll them out
darkerside 3y ago
A lot of people are mistaking my explanation for why people are interested in OKRs for an endorsement of OKRs. I think having goals is good, understanding how they type into the broader company mission is good, but being able to adapt is also good. OKRs:goal-setting::Scrum:agile

koliber 3y ago

OKRs are a goal setting framework for non-trivial 3-12 month goals. Some people are self motivated and well organized, are great at communicating progress proactively to other stakeholders, an understand the idea of cross departmental alignment. OKRs will not help them. For everyone else, OKRs are a tool that can help accomplish those things. PS I actually like OKRs and after a lot of effort, learned how to make them useful. I did not get it at first either.

ninkendo 3y ago
The problem for me is the “key results” part of OKR’s. It means that if it’s not measurable, it’s not an OKR, and in too many organizations, if it’s not an OKR it’s not worth doing. Cleaning up your code base to accommodate all the gradual accumulation of small fixes/hacks is not something you can put a metric on, at least not without pulling numbers out of your ass. But everyone agrees that you can’t really have quality software without doing this. But OKR’s would say that making nothing but tactical changes to ship features and never revisiting architecture is perfectly great. The incentives always seem to push you towards tech debt. OKR proponents would say that revisiting architecture and paying down tech debt should be implicit and part of the process of achieving your results, but I’ve never seen it done. Or rather the only time I have seen it done is when someone tries to shoehorn the refactoring work into an OKR in order to justify it, making up bogus metrics, getting the OKR dropped because it’s not meaningful enough, and then just working on it anyway.
- mgburns 3y ago
  "Cleaning up your code base to accommodate all the gradual accumulation of small fixes/hacks is not something you can put a metric on" - why not? generally the need to refactor is driven by something - getting too hard to make changes? productivity down? introducing more errors then we used to? In those cases improving productivity or reducing errors is the result we're targeting, and cleaning the code is the activity we do to achieve the result.
  - ninkendo 3y ago

pvdoom 3y ago

To me its not OKRs specifically but organisations in general - what is an organisation and how does it actually work (as opposed to what we tell ourselves), and that includes the frameworks and processes we use. OKRs are interesting then because they are a specific framework that maybe, or maybe not works. But people getting obsessed about OKRs in particular and making them "fun" are completely missing the bigger picture and the purpose of metrics, as tools of control and stuff...

cust 3y ago

[dead]

knallfrosch 3y ago

Feels like people start by wanting to do good work, then they need to invent an objective retroactively. Add external accountability and meetings, et voilà!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

epolanski 3y ago

When my previous company introduced them I pointed out that despite several studies, not one could conclude that OKRs had any positive effect and that the only famous "success" case, Google, didn't prove at all that Google was successful due to them but arguably, despite them. Let's just say that I didn't won any popularity awards there for being the rational one.

alexterrien 3y ago
Could you link to the studies you mention here?

ekianjo 3y ago

Googlers probably?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]