Summary: A growth methodology framework, Objective, and key results, (or OKRs) is an effective method of planning and measuring the success of an organization at the individual team level. But when companies apply OKR to an individual team member, they fall short. OKR’s strategic planning method contributes to team goals and adds real value to the company and its customers.
What is OKR?
Objectives and Key Results or OKRs is the most popular framework for teams to plan and measure the success metrics of their work. With OKR planning, the leader of the team at each organization set aspirational goals as objectives,
The objective is what you want to accomplish. The key result is how you’re going to get it done. The objectives are typically farsighted for a longer period. They’re bold and aspirational. The key results are aggressive, but always measurable, time-bound, and limited in number.
But remember OKRs are kept in the middle of the table, not in the corner.
OKRs would only guide you if you’ll perform a weekly check-in, else your OKR planning will be just another approach to unfinished business.
OKR is not like you set the goals and then stuff them away in a drawer and ignore them. Your team leader/ CEO would not like it. If the leader would be ambitious he/she will care and must be watching your goals and cheering them up.
If a leader wants to follow a top to bottom approach in the organization, OKR strategic planning will be a great tool for doing it.
Check out the Datalligence OKR tool now
Quarterly and Annual planning of OKR
OKR is time bounded and needed to be achieved within the desired timeline, else it would be taken casually & it would be an ambiguous goal. Strategic OKR planning needs to be it with numbers, with some plans and boards needed to be set and reported.
OKRs can strongly be breaking your goals into quarters will let you analyze team efforts adapt to the process more easily, and ultimately better hit their goals.
Generally, annual goals are alluring, know why?
Annual OKR or goals are normally like a shooting star ( like a wish), the first goals set at the annual leadership. For example, We need to hit $ 700mill in ARR to be a market leader or we want to be present globally with a 25% increase in the speed of innovation.
Annual goals act as broad guidance and focus on long-term goals. But when OKRs are in a tool and monitored daily- that makes more sense. That doesn’t mean annual goals are not ambitious or timebound but they highlight the issue of tracking progress.
Benefits of Quarterly Planning
1. Greater Flexibility of goals
When goals are quarterly cadence gives your teams more flexibility to adapt to new challenges more easily without making changes to the annual plans.
2. Visible results
Breaking the larger, annual goal into quarterly pieces gives teams more tangible results and makes the OKR planning more strategic, if the goal is not achieved in Q1 it can be modified in Q2 and key results around can be altered easily.
3. New information week to week
Generally, start-up companies that are in the building stage keep on changing their strategies and revamp their entire plans, for that shorter period of plans are helpful to update new key results around.
5 Steps for planning OKRs
Company values play a vital role in planning and rolling out OKR in your organization and guide your team on how to behave to achieve your company goals.
Before planning for OKR, your company values can help you in OKR strategic planning. You can rule out doing things that are inconsistent with your values and encourage everyone in the organization to call out behaviors inconsistent with these Values.
Step 1: Understand the mission and vision of your company
This first step i