With Personal OKR and Personal Kanban to Your Success E-Book

Patrick Niven

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 83

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

"Many of us have a desire to achieve certain goals. Goals in a professional, personal, family or any other context. Opportunities abound. Nevertheless, we often give them away. This happens in the majority of cases not because we have another, more important or more attractive goal, nor because we are lazy. Many of us are very diligent and work really hard. Nevertheless, success eludes us completely or at least partially. In most cases, this is not due to a lack of ability, but because we do not choose the appropriate approaches to achieve our goals. The combination of Personal OKR and Personal Kanban has advanced me personally and professionally over the past few years. This book can also offer you the opportunity to safely achieve your own personal goals step by step. With it, I would like to make my contribution to making our society and the lives of my readership better, more successful and happier." - The author

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

To the start

OKR Knowledge

What are OKRs?

How to use OKRs to achieve goals

Achieving goals - mistakes and success factors

Successful with your personal OKRs

Step 1: What do you want to achieve?

Step 2: Make your selection

Step 3: The Key Results

Step 4: Create transparency

Step 5: Progress check

Step 6: Quarterly review

Checklist for your implementation

An example

Different types of KRs

Personal Kanban

Basics of Personal Kanban

Implementation 1: Your open tasks

The Eisenhower Principle

Visualize the flow of work and limit the work started

Visualize the workflow

Limit the work you have started

Retrospectives / Kaizen

Checklist: Create your own Personal Kanban Board

Advanced methods in Personal Kanban

Insert more columns

Unplanned tasks

Swimlanes and Personal Kanban

Story Splitting

Service classes

Combining Personal Kanban and OKRs

Implement your OKRs

Afterword

Note

To the start

I am pleased to welcome you as a reader of this small guide to the successful use of OKR to achieve your own goals - professional or private.

OKR is a method developed at IBM for setting, tracking and achieving set goals. It has been continuously developed and is used by companies such as Google as an important basis for their success.

Kanban is used by leading global corporations in manufacturing environments, but also increasingly in knowledge-based processes to improve collaboration and goal achievement.

Now, you most likely don't own a global corporation and your goals might not be quite as extensive as Google's, for example. But that doesn't mean that you can't still have goals in life and that it's important to you to achieve them.

Let me start by asking you, before we get started here, do you actually have goals? Have you sat down quietly lately and thought about what you really want to achieve and how you can make it happen? Surprisingly few people really do this and tend to confuse goals with wishes that you say along the lines of: "I'd like to have that too", "I'd like to be there one day"...

Accordingly, let's do a little introductory exercise as a first step. Please take a few minutes and write down on a piece of paper your five1 most important professional goals. If you are not interested in professional goals, you can of course also write down goals from another area of your life. However, try to focus on one area of life so that you don't get bogged down. Then, for each goal, note since when you have it (estimate if necessary), by when it should be implemented, and when (and how) you last consciously worked on realizing the goal. The whole thing could look like this:

Destination

Start date

When to reach?

Last conscious activity

Acquisition of a higher vocational qualification (part-time)

3.1.2022

5.1.2025

Participation in further training module "X

When I do this introductory exercise with course participants, I often find that many find it very difficult to write down their goals. Some realize that they have never really thought about it, others have far too many goals and can't decide what to write down. Sometimes, however, I experience people who find in this exercise that they have constantly changing goals and are not at all sure which direction to really go in. Sometimes goals seem to depend on the day, depending on what they have just experienced or what they have read or heard about. This not infrequently leads to the fact that eventually and finally no goal can be achieved at all.

It's a bit like you're driving on the highway, and depending on which truck you're passing, you'd adjust the destination each time. There's a truck coming from Hamburg and it's clear: Yes, I want to go to Hamburg! But a few dozen kilometers further on, you overtake a truck reading about the Bavarian Alps, and of course that would be something you'd really like to see! And so you turn around and drive south until you finally pass a truck of a flower dealer from the Netherlands and spontaneously decide that the tulip fields in the Netherlands might be quite interesting after all. Then, when you look out the window in the evening after a day behind the wheel, you realize to your astonishment that you are just passing the highway entrance where you entered the highway in the morning. Time and again I hear from people experiences that fit this image. They run around all day, exert themselves, do their really best, and yet have the impression that they not only get nowhere, but also always stay about the same distance from their destinations.

Too many goals, or goals that are spontaneously adjusted on an ongoing basis, lead to confusion. We get bogged down in many tasks, measures and activities and so it happens that instead of taking care of the important issues, we often spend the whole day implementing urgent things. Important tasks are often left until they become urgent or are forgotten behind the daily business. Due to the situation of having to meet many tasks and demands, we also realize again and again that things we have started are not finished because priorities have changed in between or a multitude of (other) urgent tasks have prevented us from implementing and completing what we really wanted to achieve.

This not only leads to us "not getting off the ground", but also has the effect of making us dissatisfied and demotivated, and in many cases this makes us even quicker to set new goals in order to "do something". So it also happens that even once we have achieved a goal, there is no satisfaction or sense of achievement. Because we are already thinking about the fact that there is a huge number of other goals waiting for us and that we haven't actually achieved anything yet.

Working with this publication, you will find ways for yourself to select the goals that are important to you from the mass of them, to work on them specifically, and to implement them. To do this, it is necessary that you not only read the information, but also implement the exercises yourself and actively work on them. This, by the way, is the most important reason why guidebooks often do not work: unfortunately, there is a large percentage of only readers of books and especially of guidebooks or similar books. However, success will never come from reading alone: So you won't lose weight if you stuff your face with French fries while reading a diet guide!

Make your investment in this book an investment in your future and take the first step towards achieving your goals by using this book as a workbook and implementing the content accordingly. Highlight things that seem important to you. Read up on things as needed and most importantly: get busy with the exercises and tasks. Only then will your investment in the purchase of this book have paid off and you will be significantly closer to realizing your goals.

But perhaps it is fundamentally difficult for you to formulate goals at all. Perhaps you don't have any goals because you gave up setting goals a long time ago or were unable to keep your goals in the past anyway. Unimplemented New Year's resolutions sometimes lead to these realizations. However, some people simply struggle with goal setting and wish someone would do it for them. Often this leads to such people being listless and empty. If there is no goal worth striving for: Then why and for what should I commit myself?

In the course of working with this text, you will learn how to find goals within yourself that seem worth striving for and how to realize them step by step. This will take effort. But when you see how you are gradually approaching your goals, you will find the necessary strength to do so. Because your own personal success will inspire you and move you forward step by step.

I also ask you to actively use this book and implement the tasks and exercises. If you don't want to do that, I suggest you give the book to someone who does. Just from reading it - or worse, just from having the book in a pile somewhere that you want to work through at some point - nothing will change in your life. But it is precisely in making a change that I want to support you, because that is what this book was written for.

If it wasn't particularly challenging for you to name specific goals, it could be that you are looking for a way to reliably achieve them. Perhaps you have already been successful in doing so and would simply like to improve your skills in this regard. Or perhaps you have stalled in setting goals and failed in implementing them, or at least experienced difficulties in doing so. Perhaps you have also put off the implementation and the measures necessary for it for a long time?

You, too, will find support in this book. Personal OKR is an approach that supports both the setting of goals and the implementation of the measures necessary to achieve them. Of course, it will also be of decisive importance for you that you not only read the book, but also do the exercises and implement the knowledge imparted.

1 if you have more goals, decide on the five most important ones

OKR Knowledge

What are OKRs?

OKR stands for "Objectives and Key Results". We can translate Objectives as "goals" and Key Results as "important intermediate results". In combination, they form the core elements for our approach to setting and achieving goals.