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OKRs (Practices (OKR Management Tool
If you set up OKRs but they are not…
OKRs
Practices
OKR Post-mortem
When a committed objective is not achieved, run a blameless post-mortem session to identify root causes an learn from it.
Promoting OKRs
When a team OKR is so important that it deserves company wide attention, it can be promoted to a higher level.
OKRs nested cycles
Small cycles for check-in, longer (quarterly) for tactical OKRs and yearly for strategic. At the end of each cycle a new retrospective, definition and alignment and presentation happens.
Pairing Key Results
To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, measure both the effect and the counter-effect.
360º Alignment
Each OKR proposed needs to be aligned with all people/teams interested or affected by it.
OKR Shepherd/Champion
The OKR system unleashes its powers as more people use it. Therefore it is essential to have someone to train and coach the users and strong influence from the top executives to incentivize
OKR Management Tool
If you set up OKRs but they are not easy read, navigate and open to everyone, they don't deliver maximum value, a good system will:
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Save time, money and frustration
Tracking
The single greatest motivator is 'making progress in one's work'. Therefore, track and make it public along the whole cycle.
After checking-in, or in a review mid-cycle, you can:
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Check-in
Checking throughout the cycle in short meetings ingrain OKRs in the company culture. Focus on Improving OKRs vs. putting out fires and improving results instead of creating excuses. Use the format:
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Winner's Fridays
To keep teams motivated to pursue challenging goals, the progress towards the goal needs to be shared and celebrated. Get the teams together to shared the wins and create an achiever culture.
Retrospect
To make it more valuable, at the end of each cycle, follow a process to learn from the experience before starting the next cycle
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Self-Assessment - Given the score and the context, how do the team/person evaluates its performance in that KR? (you can have scored 100% but in a very easy target, or 30% in a difficult market situation)
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On vertical alignment
Bi-directional goal setting
Engaging the teams in creating their own OKRs, aligned with the strategic ones, creates engagement and a better understanding of the strategy while making the process simpler and faster.
Cascading OKRs (top KR = Lower Objective)
Many exemples on the book or on internet use this approach.
Shared OKRs
In a shared OKR, two or more teams share the same OKR, but each team has different initiatives and they meet regularly to track progress.
Mindset
Top-Down and Bottom-up
Cascading goals top-down takes too much time and effort, misses on the front-line expertise and fails to create engagement. Engaging the teams in creating their own OKRs, aligned with the strategic ones, creates engagement and a better understanding of the strategy while making the process simpler and faster.
Divorced from Compensation
OKR is a management tool, not an employee evaluation tool. To have challenging goals, it needs to be safe to fail.
Aggressive and Aspirational
OKR believes in enabling the team to set challenging goals. Goals that make the team rethink the way they work to reach peak performance.
Short cycles and flexible - Agile goals
Instead of using annual static planning, OKR takes an agile approach. By using shorter goal cycles, companies can adapt and respond to change.
The perfect and the good
No need to be perfect, they can be refined at any moment
Less is more
Innovation means to say no to a thousand things - the art is to focus and select the ones with higher leverage
Alignment and Autonomy
An optimal OKR system frees contributors to set at least some of their objectives and most or all of their KRs
OKRs are not islands
They create a network to connect an organization's most vital work. Alignment, less duplicated work, more cross-functional collaboration
Public and Transparency
The primary purpose of OKR is to create alignment in the organization. To do so, OKRs are public to all company levels — everyone has access to everyone else’s OKRs.
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Pitfalls
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Moonshot risks
Demotivate the team
People like beating goals, so setting the bar too high from the beginning can be frustrating
Lack of accountability and commitment
“Hey, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a stretch goal”.
Alignment Issues
Especially when using activity-based Key Results, moonshots can cause alignment issues between interdependent teams.
Functional OKRs
When individuals inside a cross-functional teams are chasing different goals (design, engineering, QA) defined by their function, the team looses focus on the shared goal the business/product one.
Definitions
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Objectives
Stuff of inspiration and far horizons. Principle, vision. Memorable
They are memorable qualitative descriptions of what you want to achieve. Objectives should be short, inspirational and engaging. An Objective should motivate and challenge the team.
Key Results
Earthbound, metric-driven, related to practice and execution
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Typically include hard numbers: revenue, growth, active user, quality, safety, market share, customer engagement.
Should be succinct, specific, and measurable.The completion of all key results must result in attainment of the goal
Types on content
Output / Activities
Measure the completion of task, milestones or projects.
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Initiatives
What we are going to do to reach our OKR: projects, tasks or activities. Initiatives trace to a value-type KR.
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