When assembling an agile team in Weekdone, the main questions we ask are:
- “What are the objectives this team needs to accomplish?”
- “Will individuals be able to change direction as priorities change?
We are not talking about sales people needing to write code or the marketing team becoming an HR team. In a high-performing team, you need specialists with a wide range of skills in their chosen field. Teams made up of cross-functional groups of people that are able to perform most tasks by themselves are called agile teams.
Having an high-performing agile team is every manager’s and leader’s dream. Motivated and engaged employees that set agile team goals are able to go further, get more done, and reach the gold faster.
However, it can be a challenge for leaders. You must have the right company culture, the right employees, and you must combine those things effectively. This requires a way to easily track and measure your team’s performance – to ensure your employees work on impactful, motivating, and ambitious goals (without micromanaging!)
The OKR process to support agile team goals
No team can do what’s expected of them unless you clarify the vision and get them involved. We believe that one of the best methods for setting goals in your agile teams is the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) methodology.
The meaning of OKR is different for various levels in an organization – company, individual and cross-functional teams, departments, and individuals. However, in any case, companies use agile OKRs due to the flexible and scalable nature.
Some common mistakes that users make when setting OKRs are:
- Bad OKRs – Using OKRs as a to-do list or a redundant copy of the roadmap.
- OKRs in silos – Teams not aligning goals and ending up with conflicting OKRs.
- Setting OKRs like a New Year’s resolution – Setting goals but not reviewing or tracking them.
A way to make sure you don’t fall victim to those mistakes is by adapting the OKR processes. This means you’ll collaboratively set, align, and achieve OKRs company-wide through active check-ins and weekly planning.
- Set OKRs that measure impact instead of tasks;
- Align them with other teams to solve interdependencies;
- Create a weekly follow-through cadence to Achieve them.
Shift direction as needed with agile goals
If your current goals do not work as well as you’d like, you need to change them or define a new direction by keeping in mind the OKR process mentioned above.
A personal example from my own experience at Weekdone:
While, working in marketing, I was hired to produce content. 9 months later, we discovered that while I accomplish my tasks well, they don’t have the result we expected.
At this point we were measuring tasks instead of impact. Luckily, we understood it fast enough and had a long discussion about what tasks and initiatives would be more impactful.
So, I changed directions to focus on SEO and paid advertising. While I was still working in marketing, I began doing completely different things. Thanks to having an agile team, everyone has some basic understanding of different aspects of their field. While originally a content writer, I know how other fields of marketing operate.
Free Download for Agile Teams – Dual Track Template
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Set agile goals – see impact in Weekdone
To stay connected with how your employees are navigating the waters, you should always have an overview of what’s going on in your company.
Monitoring your teams and making sure they are working on the most impactful tasks and projects is no easy task. The weekly follow-through and weekly review of OKRs requires a platform that makes it easy and automated. Otherwise, you’ll spend hours back tracking and sending messages and emails to see what’s been updated and needs to be done.
Weekdone features are created to support your team and company’s OKR journey – especially thanks to the straightforward weekly planning and reporting dashboards and overviews. The OKR software features help leaders and managers keep track of teams’ weekly tasks and quarterly OKRs. The transparent nature of the product assures everyone is in-tune with the most important priorities and happenings across the company.
In Weekdone, you add OKRs and update them weekly to stay up to date on progress (or lack-thereof). If some teams are lagging behind or their tasks have little impact on the company’s long-term objective, you’ll be able to see problems and roadblocks ahead of time. Agile teams need agile leaders to support them.
Measure the impact your teams make on their quarterly goals.