Nowadays, established and new organisations choose OKR as an effective tool to develop new innovations, stay competitive and expand market share.
OKR ( Objective & Key Results) is a popular management framework that has been successful used by startup s and tech companies. Initially formed from work undertaken as Intel responded to industry challenges and articulated through authors such as John Doer ( Measure what matters) it has been successfully used by tech organisations such as Oracle, Google, adobe meta as well as others such as Gates foundation and deloitte..
Many established companies can struggle with developing new innovations and the causes can including the inertia of the organisaiton as wella sthe complexity of existing solutions or workarounds that developed over time.
OKRs are a perfect combination of Stratey, pragmatic Project management and continuous improvement lean philosophy which together encourages a questioning and continuous rationalisation.
When implemented effectively OKRs can deliver
- Common vision of direction which around a clear strategy cascaded to realistic goals and measurable key results
- A common language for articulating what needs to be done that underpins a culture encouraging the sharing of knowledge within and across teams
- An approach to engage different stakeholders and knowledge experts to accelerate the identification and best actions to resolve business and organisation challenge
- A momentum for innovation which is then broken down into short burst/sprints of activity which team members can see as relevant and mostly achievable
- A learning and feedback which informs prioritisation of the next set of measurements
Typically designed to cycle on 3 or 4 month blocks the OKR approach can work well with specific agile development cycles seen in production and software development environments.
The strategi vision for an organisation may have elements that are 5 or 10 years into the future but this can get broken down to a number of objectives for different business areas which have shorter duration but clear linkage to the vision and this is then broken down to measurable targets defined as key results
Challenges on Implementation
The key is that all levels must be engaged in the business unit that are introducing the OKR approach. It is often good practice to have a focus on looking to involve all the team.
A typical approach might include :-
- Explain to the wider audience what the problems or challenges are and what the new reality will look like.
- Explain how OKrs can help with this transformation particularly in areas such as transparency , alignment and clarity of communication.
- Introduce Ambassador / coordinator roles where you empower trainers / consultants to advise and coach others on the detail of the process and the detail of building up credible and agreed OKRs.
- Provide clear timeline and what will happen when
- Provide clear detail on what recording tools will be used both in the initial period and at later stages.
- Use a collaborative approach to running the workshops to encourage input from all and help cement acceptance of agreed OKR
- Set up regular reviews / checkins throughout the OKR cycle . All staff tasked with initiatives and delivering key results should proactively report progress and issues typically weekly
Note whilst spreadsheets can provide an initial quick deployment tool there are a number of cloud based tools now which provide great ease in collaboration. There are also useful tools to help integrate metrics and results from different business systems back into the OKR monitoring tools
Approach to preparing the workshops
Typically for each OKR cycle there needs to be 4 hour/half day workshop run 1 to 2 weeks before the start of each new OKR cycle ( which might by every 3 or every 4 months)
Participants should include a ll team members , a lead who is the co-ordinator / lead manger as well as a coach or facilitator for the session.
Note : collaboration tools such as MIro / Basecamp as well as Teams / slack / Assert etc. can greatly accelerate documenting and agreeing decisions.
Before the workshop
- Executives need a clear agreed view on the 5 yr , 3yr and 1 yr horizon of the strategy
- The co-ordinator will encourage Converationsto be had across the organisation to get input from stakeholders to ensure they commit resource to the workshop and flesh out the challenges and obstacles
QUESTIONS SHOULD INCLUDE
- What is not working now ?
- What issue are we trying to solve
- What do we do that most impacts the overall goals
- Do we measure the right things in our reporting pack
- What works / What does not work with recent changes
- How could we improve what we do
- What issues are impacted by decisions outside of our team
The co-ordinator compiles and issues a briefing to attendees that articulate current performance data and the current position against higher level objectives are targets that can be identified
The coach and co-ordinator will make an agenda for the meeting which must be structured to encourage team collaboration and encourage all to contribute ideas and opinions.
