Objectives and Key Results
Objectives and Key Results
The Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) capability’s enablers include Enterprise OKRs, Portfolio OKRs, Program OKRs, and Team OKRs. Each capability within the Planview Capability Framework has a distinct set of features and functionality, business processes, best practices, and analytics and reports that deliver value to customers in the form of specific business outcomes.
Enablers and Business Outcomes
Enterprise OKRs
Define the company-level objectives. These are informed by your long-term strategy for the organization. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can understand the enterprise/company-level strategy and objectives.
Portfolio OKRs
Crystallize your strategic themes and investment objectives. OKRs owned by the Portfolio should demonstrate the contribution of epics towards desired outcomes and help you with investment decision-making. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can demonstrate the contribution of epics towards desired outcomes and make investment decisions at the portfolio level.
Program OKRs
Program OKRs assist with vision setting and provide context as epics are unpacked, looking for features that will contribute to the defined objectives. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can understand how best to contribute to the defined objectives and how epics are informing them.
Team OKRs
Team OKRs align with features and provide discipline when articulating outcomes rather than solutions. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can track against the features being delivered and get early awareness of the provided value.
Best Practices
Align OKRs to business strategy
Connecting and aligning goals at every level of the organization is one of key benefits of the OKRs framework – everyone wins when they understand how their work fits into the big picture strategy of the organization. Using an objective hierarchy – where enterprise or corporate strategy-level objectives are defined, then teams define their objectives to align to the strategy-level or levels in between – allows organizations to have bidirectional goal alignment.
Use informal language for objectives
The purpose of objectives in the OKR structure is to challenge companies to reach toward lofty, intimidating goals. Many organizations choose to use simple and informal language to write their objectives – this is intentional. To be effective, objectives must be easy to communicate and easy to understand.
Define your objectives properly
Objectives are simply defined by what is to be achieved, and should be ambitious (big-picture, aspirational), qualitative (able to be defined verbally in concrete terms), actionable (able to be implemented in current conditions), and time-bound (a timeline should be defined in the objective itself). Look at examples of OKRs from other organizations to get a better understanding of how to define OKRs.
Define specific and measurable key results
Key results make your objective actionable and determine how progress toward your objective will be measured. Key results give team members a clear-cut way of knowing whether they’re making progress, and provide leadership a subjective way of assessing performance. Key results should be measurable, specific, time-bound, and verifiable. Look at examples of OKRs from other organizations to get a better understanding of how to define key results.
Track early versus lagging indicators
Ensure the metrics you measure for key results can be collected and analyzed during the time period specified for the OKR. Many business metrics – such as revenue – are lagging indicators, and not timely or accurate enough to determine the impact of one specific change.
Reevaluate OKRs if progress slows
It can be helpful to look for patterns in OKR scoring to gauge whether your OKRs are sufficiently “sized” for your organization or team. Similarly, if your organization is struggling to make meaningful progress on most of its goals, then you might need to adjust the size or quantity of your OKRs moving forward to make them more achievable.
Create shared OKRs
Create shared OKRs if your OKRs overlap with another team’s goals.
Processes and Reports
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are an outcome-driven framework adopted by organizations who want to define key organizational goals and track progress toward achieving them. Defining OKRs creates organizational clarity by enabling organizations to answer the questions “Where do we want to go?” (Objectives) and “How will we measure our efforts to get there?” (Key Results). OKRs can be created at different levels of an organizational structure – such as enterprise, portfolio, program, or team – and are connected using parent/child relationships. Linking organizational and team goals in a hierarchical way aligns work delivery to company strategy, and provides a single line of sight into value delivered by the organization.
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