At the inaugural Project to Product (P2P) Summit in 2024, Greschen Powell, a seasoned leader with over 26 years at FedEx, delivered an insightful presentation on how organizations can accelerate value delivery using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Value Stream Management (VSM). Powell’s talk provides a clear roadmap for boosting speed-to-market while staying aligned with strategic goals.
How FedEx Scaled: A Case Study in Complexity
With over 500,000 employees worldwide and more than 15 million packages delivered daily, FedEx operates on an intricate network of physical logistics, data-driven intelligence, and Agile software teams. At the heart of this vast enterprise are over 1,000 Agile teams working collaboratively to align their efforts with the company’s strategic vision.
Despite its complexity, FedEx faces universal challenges in delivering customer value efficiently. Every organization, regardless of size, seeks to be faster, more efficient, and strategically aligned with the value it delivers to its customers. Achieving these goals requires a dual approach: defining value through OKRs and accelerating value delivery through VSM.
The Power of OKRs: Aligning Strategy with Execution
A major theme of the presentation was the critical role of OKRs in defining and measuring value. OKRs were defined as the following:
Objectives – Clear, ambitious, and inspirational statements of what the organization aims to achieve.
Key Results – Measurable indicators that track progress towards objectives, ensuring alignment and focus.
Powell stressed that OKRs should be limited to a few high-priority objectives with no more than five key results per objective. This constraint ensures that organizations maintain focus and avoid being overwhelmed by competing priorities.
Value Stream Management: Measuring and Optimizing Flow
Once an organization defines and measures value through OKRs, the next step is to accelerate its delivery. This is where VSM comes into play. Powell detailed the five essential flow metrics that help teams understand and optimize their value streams:
- Flow Velocity – Measures how many work items (such as features or bug fixes) are completed within a given period.
- Flow Time – Tracks the total time taken from the initiation of work to completion.
- Flow Load – Measures the average number of work items in progress at any given time.
- Flow Efficiency – The ratio of value-added time to total time, highlighting waste in the process.
- Flow Distribution – Breaks down completed work into categories such as new features, defect fixes, risk work, and technical debt reduction.
By leveraging these metrics, organizations can gain insights into their development processes, identify bottlenecks, and implement targeted improvements.
Real-World Applications: Learning from FedEx’s Journey
Powell shared real-life examples from FedEx’s implementation of VSM, demonstrating how data-driven decision-making can drive meaningful improvements. One particularly compelling case involved a team struggling with high flow load, i.e., they had too many concurrent work items relative to what team members could actually deliver.
Through experimentation, the team tested the hypothesis that reducing work-in-progress (WIP) would lead to faster completion rates. By capping their flow load at a level aligned with historical velocity, they improved their throughput by 29% in ten months. This experiment validated the principle that “less WIP equals more done.”
Additionally, conducting a bottleneck analysis can further improve flow efficiency. By using Planview’s VSM platform to track where work was getting stuck, FedEx teams identified a testing bottleneck that was slowing down overall delivery. By adopting ephemeral test environments, they reduced testing bottlenecks and improved flow time by 20%.
Watch a on-demand demo of the Planview VSM platform to discover how high-performing software delivery organizations are delivering faster and efficiently.
The Strategic Connection Between OKRs and VSM
OKRs and VSM go hand in hand. While OKRs set the strategic direction, VSM ensures that the work teams are doing aligns with those goals and that processes are continuously refined. She outlined three key benefits of integrating these frameworks: strategic alignment (all efforts contribute to business outcomes), faster delivery (optimizing processes to reduce cycle times), and improved quality (balancing speed with risk management and technical debt reduction).
To support lasting improvement, a structured continuous improvement cycle is critical. This begins with analyzing metrics to identify problem areas and establish a performance baseline using VSM insights. From there, teams can form hypotheses about how to improve flow, test those ideas, and measure results against the baseline. Successful changes should then be shared and scaled across teams. Powell also warned against treating flow metrics as static reports for management. Instead, she encouraged using them as dynamic, actionable insights that fuel ongoing progress.
A Roadmap to Accelerated Speed-to-Value
To help organizations assess and improve their maturity in applying OKRs and VSM, Powell introduced a five-level framework:
- Level 1: No OKRs or VSM – Initial phase where value and flow are undefined.
- Level 2: Initial Adoption – Basic value stream mapping and early OKR implementations.
- Level 3: Defined Process – Established OKRs and VSM solutions in place.
- Level 4: Optimization – Continuous improvement cycles are embedded in operations.
- Level 5: Full Acceleration – Strategic alignment and optimized flow are fully integrated.
Organizations can enter this framework at different points and progress iteratively, tailoring their approach based on existing maturity levels.
Final Thoughts
Powell concluded her talk by encouraging organizations to embrace a mindset of continuous improvement. She underscored that integrating OKRs with VSM is not a one-time event but an ongoing journey. By leveraging data-driven insights, companies can systematically enhance efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, and maintain a competitive edge.
For businesses looking to take their speed-to-value to the next level, Powell’s presentation provided a practical, proven roadmap. By defining value with OKRs and accelerating its delivery with VSM, organizations can ensure they are not only working fast—but working smart.
As Powell aptly stated, “When we unite business outcomes using OKRs with flow outcomes enabled by VSM, we unlock the power to accelerate value delivery at scale.”
With these insights, organizations can take a structured, strategic approach to improving their delivery processes—ensuring they remain agile, responsive, and aligned with their most critical business objectives.
Watch the on-demand webinar to discover how FedEx accelerated speed-to-market while aligning key initiatives with strategic business goals.
