How to apply Evidence Based Management framework in organisations?
Hello Practitioners,
Currently, we are using Key Revenue Areas within our organization which is linked to our employee performance evaluation. However, we have no collaboration, focus, alignment among different function namely product, design, technology & marketing. We are exploring to implement EBM framework along with OKR as per below format,
- We are planning to apply the OKR tool with common objectives every quarter across all functions within the organization and key results with the timeline by reviewing them as part of our Sprint Review.
- We also wanted to start applying a few EBM framework metrics to enable our people as teams by dividing them across three geographies which serve unique product experience even though the underlying technology stack remains the same as the platform.
- Also finally we wanted to understand from practitioners how should we have our performance evaluation for our team members instead of our current individual evaluation which is performed on a quarterly basis.
Is the above format good to begin requesting your recommendations?
Thanks,
Umar
Do you currently have a Scrum Team which releases valuable increments into production each & every Sprint, and which might serve as an exemplar to others?
Hello Ian, Currently I have only one team which releases valuable increments into production every month but not every sprint (2 weeks Cycle). Based on the success of this one team got buy-in from Leadership team saying not just bottom-up change would enable cultural shift. Also as the transformation should be both bottom-up with support from top-down during our exploration found OKR tool and as Scrum.org recommends EBM as the framework to start using empirical metrics looking forward to know experiences of fellow practitioners on the same.
Why don't management sponsor change directly at team level in the first instance, so empiricism can be established? It's unlikely they'll get the data needed to usefully apply EBM at the moment, given that just one team can supply evidence.
Yes Ian, I concur with your approach but the leadership team wants to bring in change at the organization level and wanted to decouple our existing KRA approach which is set quarterly at team level which is component teams. Hence we thought to use OKR tool for organizational alignment for quarterly basis and perform refinement sessions on the same. Also, we believed that EBM metrics will enable people to work as teams towards goal.
Can you recommend any other alternative steps to begin with organizational transformation?
For EBM to be successfully applied, the measures across key value areas ought to be evaluated using a hypothesis-driven approach. A good objective focuses on outcomes rather than outputs.
The critical point for success is that the organization uses EBM to establish empirical process control. They’ll need to communicate a sense of urgency for change so organizational gravity is overcome. They’ll need to establish transformation and change teams, and one or more transformation backlogs, and inspect and adapt progress regularly using EBM for validation and transparency.
Transformation is a huge topic. I have more about it at agilepatterns.org, but some general advice I’d give is:
- Sponsor change. Sponsorship must come from the top, and be sufficient to overcome organizational gravity at the point of change. Having an empowered transformation rollout team can help.
- Order a transformation backlog. A large organization cannot change all at once. Certain value streams will need to be prioritised over others, and particular areas of weakness or opportunity focused on.
- Localize action. Change must be focused on delivery teams, where empirical evidence of improved value can be fostered.
- Validate improvement. The transformation which an organization undergoes must result in a demonstrably improved innovation capability.
- Enable self-organization. Change is sponsored from the top, but innovative agile teams will inspect-and-adapt their own way-of-working.
Hence we thought to use OKR tool for organizational alignment for quarterly basis and perform refinement sessions on the same. Also, we believed that EBM metrics will enable people to work as teams towards goal.
@ Mohammad Umar Farooq Did you use both at the end ? how is currently working for you ?
Hi ,
i would like to ask if anyone else is also using both OKR and EBM at their organization and how it is working for you? Background is recently we started to use the EBM and inspecting our outcomes with each release. But there are some objectives and Goals which needs to be validated/inspected over long terms, so organization wants to try OKR for this. I wanted to know if someone has experience with similar situation ? or what are the pros and cons you found by using them both ?