Focus on Increasing Value
A Fortune 10 client wanted to increase the value created by their IT teams as they spent $900 Mill in future investments. The key was focusing on customer value instead of project plans and requirements lists.
Each business focus area want through a series of workshops creating value propositions, then associated OKRs.
Evolving and improving this process meant:
Creating a new Product Coaching service,
Training product coaches in a new curriculum
Increasing the quality of OKRs for all IT teams
Providing a standard of how an OKR could be mapped into product backlogs.
Finally, the entire system had to have persistent artifacts once the consulting project was finished. This included:
Training product coach trainers
Recordings of product coach training,
Recordings of OKR improvement training sessions
Online whiteboard templates
Associated reference website pages.
Credit for main image: Photo by Startaê Team on Unsplash
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Value Propositions
Guiding teams in their first exploration of a Value Proposition is always a challenge. What will resonate with them? How can I get them onboard? Each team is subtly different from another and it takes empathy and business awareness to complete the process.
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OKRs
Developing OKRs involves bringing a team on a journey to scrape beneath the tasks and reveal the value that they bring to an organization. I developed a job aid to make sure that other coaches could help their teams create OKRs on an ongoing basis.
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Backlogs
Once the OKR is in place as strategic intent, the teams work on creating a backlog that reflects what needs to be done to make the OKR ‘real.’ For many teams this meant both removing and adding items to the backlog. Again, an intense workshop experience to guide people through a repeatable process.