OKRs Q&A Podcast Ep. 52—Are Your OKRs Measuring What Matters?
This week on the OKRs Q&A Podcast, Tim Meinhardt interviews Mark Forman. Mark details his impressive background, as well as explaining how KPIs, OKRs, and MBOs interact with one another, and how the simple choices we make when implementing OKRs have an impact on our business and the OKR program’s success. Mark is currently the Executive Vice President of Dynamic Integrated Services, a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business, but previously he worked in both the government and business sectors, notably receiving the first Presidential appointment to be the U.S. Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology. Working for companies including IBM, Unisys, KPMG, and SAIC, Mark built and led teams of consultants and program delivery for governments around the world. He excels at team building to define and achieve strategic programs and transformation initiatives.
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Tim Meinhardt:
In this exciting episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Mark Forman. Mark’s the Executive Vice President of Dynamic Integrated Services (DIS), a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business located here in the Washington D.C. area. Mark has an impressive background, and his career spans both the private and public sector and is currently spending his time supporting the efforts of the federal government. Mark brings a great perspective on organizational transformation, various aspects about MBOs, KPIs, and OKRs, and learning about the cause and effect of the choices we make when implementing OKRs and the impact it has on our OKR journey and ultimate success. This is a wonderful interview that I know you’ll find very insightful, so please, everyone grab that coffee, put in those earbuds, and enjoy my discussion with Mark Forman.
Hey, so Mark, welcome to the program.
Mark Forman:
Thanks, Tim.
Tim Meinhardt:
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, and what are you up to these days?
Mark Forman:
Well, my background is actually—we used to call it Operations Research—I think most people now call it Operations Analysis, and it was in the context of government and public policy analysis. So, I was recently a number cruncher and modeler—came into the federal government in a program that’s called the Presidential Management Fellows Program, and I came into the Government Accountability Office (GAO) as part of their hiring of number crunchers, basically, to support how they were doing audits and evaluations. I decided to take that job because I thought—this was in the Defense arena—and I thought Defense was so pure, no pork, no politics—just factual, and quickly got thrown into work to find out about the realities of budget gaming. And using my statistical analysis—which has always served me well in my career—was able to very rapidly provide the data that Congress needed. And so, I did a lot of analytics around that area. In the late ‘80s we were applying MBOs—Management by Objectives—to restructuring issues in the Defense Department—the Cold War was ending, threats were evolving, and the Defense Department—especially the office of the Secretary of Defense—was doing studies and analyses to figure out where would be the best payoff areas giving a forecast of threat around the different geographies in the world and given the different cost of bombs, missiles, and the platforms that carried them.
And of course, that got into staffing. So, I ended up on the staff of the Senate Government Affairs Committee in the ‘90s, precisely because I’d done all this work with MBOs and metrics, and the Committee wanted to have people who understood that—the concept that folks that are listening in government will recognize is the Government Performance and Results Act. The law that moved the federal government to a strategic planning model where appropriations accounts were each supposed to have performance measures and performance targets. And we did a whole bunch of government management reform work done, financial management, IT management, big program project management, streamlining initiatives so government could buy commercial items easier, something called the Government Management Reform Act which leveraged shared services and notions that modern management could actually be brought into the federal government.
I left in the late ‘90s and went to IBM and Lou Gerstner was starting his initiatives around the whole concept of e-business. I became the e-business public sector person. The Bush Administration came in and said, “We need a CIO for the federal government.” I had known and worked on a lot of the laws that created authorities for the White House to change the way they were buying IT, and I’d been doing e-business or e-government, as it was called, for four years, so I was at that point a gray beard in the context of how to modernize the government, and so I came in as a presidential appointee, as you mentioned, under President Bush. And then went out to Silicon Valley and was using MBOs—you know, we didn’t call it OKRs then—but some of the companies that are famous for VCs having their portfolio companies use OKRs we were involved with. And then came back to Washington and actually, before joining Dynamic Integrated Services—which is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business—was working at SAIC where we were also using MBOs, but we were calling them OKRs then. So, I had a lot of experience in this transition of MBOs to OKRs at various touchpoints inside and out of government.
Tim Meinhardt:
Your background—I really wanted the audience to be able to take it in how your career has come in and out of federal government, and some of the places that you’ve been, Mark. So how did you choose Atruity to begin to work with?
Mark Forman:
Well I think the OKR network is in one sense geographic in that there are these communities of practitioners that seem to be around different parts of the country and probably the world, and very much a network, and so we connect it through our network, and the other thing is there are a lot of different training options for OKRs, and so a lot of it I’d say was trust—trust and personal relationships based around the work that you’d done.
Tim Meinhardt:
Fantastic, thanks Mark. So, let’s change gears here and I really want to talk a little bit about this—and it’s a very, very fascinating topic that everybody seems to get wrapped around, which is all of the acronyms—you know, the KPIs, the MBOs, and OKRs—and I would love for you to just kinda go in and get your insight on what do you think is happening with all of these, and do they work together, and are they uniquely separate but allow themselves to work together? What are your thoughts on this, Mark?
Mark Forman:
Well, I think that there’s a fourth dimension to those acronyms, and it’s around milestones.
Tim Meinhardt:
Sure.
Mark Forman:
You know, in the OKR framework, there are objectives, which is supposed to be impactful; different than a KPI, which is supposed to be very focused and measurable. This is more one to two years, you want to make a difference in your results, and so OKRs are generally transformative at that objective level. And then the key results are generally quarterly. You want to have some way to measure your progress towards that objective. And so KPIs fit in the context of the key results—not the objective but the key results. Okay, so I mentioned this concept of milestones—the third dimension I view in the OKR framework and really within the bigger context of value stream management: can an organization pick the activities that actually generate those key results and achieve the impact? And fundamental for me in applying OKRs in the public sector setting and in fact even within my own company is that there’s an action taken by a customer or a user so that the KPI can’t be “I’ve done a milestone” or “I’ve done an activity,” but for so many organizations that’s traditionally how they did KPIs—you know, “I want to produce X amount of widgets this year so I need to do Y amount this quarter.” Or you think about a sales pipeline— “I need to maintain X amount of organizations in my pipeline, or deals in my pipeline, and I need a salesforce of Y amount of people so I’ve gotta hire those people.” There’s this gray area where an activity can only occur if somebody else participates in it, like a sale. Alright, I can put a KPI for a pipeline but to get the sale I have to have an action by somebody on the other side of that transaction—they’ve got to buy something, they’ve got to consume something.
So, the OKR framework—different from KPIs and milestones—is I’m actually getting somebody to do something; I’m figuring out the activity that results in somebody doing something that’s a creative to that goal. And I think in the context you also have KPIs—I love what the Wodtke foursquare focuses on with the health check—the health metrics. They’re just basic things in running the business that you gotta maintain your KPIs on—profitability or if you’re running projects on budget and on schedule—those are things that are under your control and that they reflect the health. The impactful objective for me and that concept of where the KPI and key result matches is “Did I get somebody to do something that moves me along further that says I’m closer to that end objective?”
Tim Meinhardt:
Right, absolutely, wonderful. Mark, thank you. So, how are you using OKRs not only within your organization but some of the work that you’re doing right now, Mark?
Mark Forman:
Yeah, so, let me give it to you in our organization first. We’re successful—we have one project where we’re—take a step back—one project where we’re rolling out value stream management for a government client. Value stream management is the use of OKRs linked to activities and the activities could be things like developing software or modernizing modifying software, or it could be developing it in a new service. So, the activity side of value stream management is understanding where you’re managing your activities well, and the OKR side of value stream management is are those activities and the way you’re managing them systematically giving your better results from your customers? More customers using your service, are more customers renewing a license; but in the government context it’s generally more internal or external customers using their service. So, our OKR for our team on that project is not just the traditional are we on budget, are we on schedule, are we hitting our milestones task—it’s literally is that organization now adopting OKRs and value stream management and are they using value stream management to deliver better results to their customers? So have they adopted this value stream management and the OKR model appropriately? And as you know and you teach, OKRs are not magic, it’s not like you do it in the first quarter and everybody’s successful—it’s a learning experience, and it’s an [inaudible 00:11:58] experience, and so we have that in the KRs, our key results by quarter, in terms of adoption of various aspects of it. So that’s how we’re using it on that project now.
Now on the client side, there’s a clear transition that the client wants to make in terms of aligning the results of their IT activities to what matters to their customers—the public, the constituents. And so traditionally the way this has been done in Agile Product Development and this organization takes advantage of SAFE—the Scale Agile Framework for Enterprises—they track are they doing a good job at producing, are they efficient at producing a various set of features and functions that come out of human center design, you know, maybe user interface. And so, they produce these features and functions, and they demonstrate them, and they celebrate how cool these features and functions are, then nobody uses them!
Tim Meinhardt:
Right, but they’re cool!
Mark Forman:
Yeah, and they came out of Human Center Design, and so the gap that I think the client is trying to close here is between doing things that produce “cool” widgets and doing things that are actually used by the intended audience.
Tim Meinhardt:
Imagine that, right? But it happens all the time.
Mark Forman:
It’s a conundrum
Tim Meinhardt:
It’s a conundrum, isn’t that the truth?
Mark Forman:
Yeah, because you’re using Human Center Design in this SAFE methodology for Agile, and so you’d think well, you designed it to what the humans want, so why aren’t they using those new cool capabilities? I think one of the greatest learnings I’ve had is that a lot of people who are doing Human Center Design and Agile like to focus on the user interface, but the underlying problem—the binding constraint, if you will—is that the process sucks. And so, no matter how pretty you make that, you know, what they used to say, put lipstick on the pig, nobody still wants to use that process.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right, it still oinks.
Mark Forman:
Yeah, so that’s the concept that drew OKRs and the OKR framework, that is the real learning experience, and you know, it’s not magic, it’s not overnight. It does take learning and over time the intent is that the agency gets better and better at understanding the activities that really matter to their customers—to the citizens.
Tim Meinhardt:
Excellently said. You know, there’s a couple of really good points there, Mark. You know, OKR’s really a journey, you know, we teach that, and we believe in that when you get started—I’ll call it your goal-setting muscle—it’s uncomfortable. Everybody’s traditionally in business, and even in the federal government, everybody is used to reporting, okay, what happened. It’s very difficult to be able to say, “Okay, what are we gonna do?” That goal-setting mentality, it just takes a while to get it right, to where number one, did you set the right goal? Is it really what moved the needle? Is it aligned to what it is to the greater cause, or the North Stars of the organization? And then you start looking at key results, and it’s “Did I set them aggressively? Did I set them too aggressive? Not aggressive enough?” And even the one that you brought up, Mark, which really really—to me I thought it was really terrific— “Are you measuring the right thing?” You know, is this really the thing that’s gonna move the needle? And so, you know, I think that’s just fabulous insight for our audience, and I’m gonna close with maybe one other question here. It’s that what other insight would you provide our audience about using OKRs Mark? Anything else that has struck you in your experience and what makes them unique and powerful in today’s world?
Mark Forman:
Well, it’s hard for organizations to do this, but I think the notion of team OKRs versus using this as part of a personnel performance system. Which, you know, KPIs were often times part of the personnel performance management concept. But here I think you want to use it as an organizational motivating tool, and to really get the organization to understand how to do a better job at servicing its customers. That the notion that, and the patience to understand, that you’re going to be measuring quarterly, you’re going to be adjusting quarterly, and that adjustment process is the critical path to understanding how to better serve your customers. You know, we’ve gone through this period—maybe it’s unique to government, I don’t know—but I had similar experience in using it in the commercial world, even in Silicon Valley, where the comfort zone is what you can control. So, people first start to pick, whether it’s KPIs or key results, they want credit for things they can control, and I think that’s human nature. But the real learning comes in understanding the cause-and-effect relationships. If it was all about what you could control directly and you knew it today, then OKRs wouldn’t be as transformative, but the reality is we spent so much of the management frameworks of the last twenty years focusing on what you could control that we’ve lost the muscle memory to connect cause-and-effect and figure out what activities actually lead to better consumption or better value to the customer.
Tim Meinhardt:
Right, right, Mark, well said. You know, that innovative thought process—people don’t actually have to succeed sometimes in those innovative thoughts. You know, it’s about going through the process and opening up your ability to think, and then adjust, like you said, on a quarterly basis. You know, you reflect, you toss them out, where are we going this quarter? Couldn’t agree with you more, Mark. Gosh, this was a wonderful, wonderful interview, and thank you so much. I’m a big believer, you know, that organizations—that our function is teams, but it’s really a team, okay? And there’s a wonderful book out on team of teams, but to me that’s taking all those teams and turning it into one team, moving it toward what’s most important—not only for what’s important within the federal government, what’s important in the commercial sector as well. And so, I just want to thank you. I think our audience will get a whole lot out of today’s discussion. Thank you so much, and I wish you all the success and DIS all the success here entering into 2022.
Mark Forman:
Thanks, thanks for all your help, Tim. Thanks, this has been great.
Tim Meinhardt:
Thank you.
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