As suspected it's useful only to the higher-ups and specifically to manage drones who need military discipline, same as scrum.
If it has an acronym it's useless to functioning contributors. The original purpose has disappeared with the name.
If it has an acronym it's useless to functioning contributors. The original purpose has disappeared with the name.
I'd say I have some pretty smart people working for me but large orgs are large because they have lots of work that needs doing and the big chunks are big enough the people doing the work tend to self-organize. Some work never stops (e.g. healthcare) so you have to establish shift work. Does that mean those people are drones? They might be young, they might enjoy a sense of belonging and camaraderie, even when things suck, and maybe they would benefit from some additional experiential learning of discipline, but does that mean they're drones? Did you consider the fact that my direct reports themselves have advanced degrees?
A word of advice ... the worst thing I could have done to you right now is ignore you and let your opinion fester. Maybe step back, have all the disdain for me you want, but I hope you at least read this far.
It turns out that OKRs made the employees happier, because it served as a “more abstract” form of feedback.
Before, they were receiving feedback, but it was too specific and narrow. Things like “this class can be refactored to X pattern” or “You missed a few unit tests covering X Y Z cases.”
But when we started tracking things like time to ship a new feature, bugs per implemented feature, hard deadlines for certain product releases, etc. it really helped to give some better feedback.
You could tell people who were writing code very fast to slow down in general, and write more stable, thought-out code.
For example, there was one dev who tended to have substantially more bugs in his code than the others, and slower ship times. It turns out that he was always being assigned to more complicated Tasks and Stories, and the poor guy was overworked to shit and he didn’t even realize it.
It’s got nothing to do with being a drone, and everything to do with not being able to improve until you measure.
Do you think Usain Bolt doesn’t have a stopwatch when he runs?
In order to keep up, we needed to turn development time from just a metric, into an OKR. Moreover, our clients sometimes put pressure on us to ship out X feature immediately, in response to a competitor. This means that sometimes the 10 devs are working on different features for different clients.
So, just like the book, “Measure what matters.” Don’t measure useless things like commits per dev or features shipped last quarter, the important thing for our division is development time.
Presumably when we get development times down, our OKRs will change to other things, like overall client satisfaction. But for now, the top concern is to meet sales volume, so our OKR is development time
The process gets heavier at the level where OKRs are getting aggregated across multiple teams, or teams of teams, but that's a cost paid by managers, not by "drones," so I don't see why line employees should be concerned with it.
FWIW I spend about four to six hours a year thinking about OKRs, and that's assuming I'm paying attention for the entire OKR team meeting (fat chance).
Concrete team stories are usually quite clear. OKRs force you to encode a bunch of them into objectives and key results. This produces utter nonsense if the duties and opportunities are generic or fragmented. Not every team can write a clear OKR which makes it obvious what's happening, especially if you servicing multiple departments.
As a non-IC, I'd spend that much time per week on OKRs: writing the OKRs for a team involved planning out the next quarter's topics, which required aligning the team (with individual meetings & group ones) for the 2-3 weeks at the end of the quarter. Then drafting them, aligning with the department/VP's topics for the quarter, finishing them, getting feedback from other team leads, dry-run presentation for the dev manager meeting, then live run-through for the department all-hands, mid-point scoring updates, end-of-quarter scoring, back to the beginning