OKR Transparency - for an very divers OKR structure

OKR - Objectives and Key Results
,
1

Hi there,
I do have a little challenge and was wondering if some of you already have faced this too :slight_smile:
We do have several Teams using OKR to push organizational and pre-development topics. But those are just a part of our whole organization (I know its not the best case having OKRs just for some people in the org, but it was the best we could achieve so far ,-) )

The teams are all new with OKRs and therefore the maturity/quality and shape of the OKR definition is quite heterogeneous.

My problem:
We need to provide some transparency to the whole organisation about "What`s going on with the OKRs. So far we use Miro to develop and push the OKRs inside of the teams, but as mentioned above, not all do use the same format for their OKRs.
Simply copying the OKR sets to a common place might not be self explaining and generate more confusion than transparency.

Does anybody maybe have an idea how to generate some transparency with an very low effort? :blush:

1 Like
2

Hi Markus,
Assuming you had subsidiaries in France (French speaking) in America (English speaking) and in Japan (Japanese speaking) and now you come up with a meeting for all subsidiaries - should everyone now speak and understand the 3 languages or is there perhaps a corporate language? The first step for me would be to build a common OKRs format, common cycles and common approach, otherwise your non-OKRers will only understand Chinese (mandatory also to achieve a common corporate goal).
:slight_smile: Hans-Peter Schreiber

3

Nevermind, especially in larger organisations it’s OK to start at a smaller level (i.e. one or two divisions, for example). We usually recommend this when helping companies through their OKR transition.

So far we use Miro to develop and push the OKRs inside of the teams, but as mentioned above, not all do use the same format for their OKRs.
Simply copying the OKR sets to a common place might not be self explaining and generate more confusion than transparency.

Why that?

First of all, even if those divisions use different places where they store their OKRs, it would be better to have one central place where all OKRs are stored. In order to make this transition and to avoid the tooling analysis paralysis, it could be a great first step to copy all OKRs in one Miro board. So I want to encourage you to progress on this step.

Then you could put some joint reflection on top and reflect on questions like

  • where do we make progress and why?
  • where does progress stall and why?
  • do we see a common pattern in our objectives (not KRs)?
  • …

Put those answers on the board, too. And iterate in small steps.

I would recommend to reflect on quality questions like “is this a KPI or a ‘real’ KR?” at a later stage because first of all you need to start where you are and then improve incrementally (principle of Kanban).

Hope that shed some light on your issues. For further reading, I would recommend our OKR practice (page is currently only in German). Or feel free to ask further questions here :smile:

Best, Björn

1 Like
4

Hi Markus,

A great start is normally one of the free or cheap OKR tools (like Tability) or OKR widgets in any project / action management tool you are using (OKRBoard for Jira, Monday.com OKR Widget), Miro is more brainstorming tool, because the main part of OKRs is NOT the set-up, it is the WEEKLY / BI-WEEKLY TRACKING of work against results.

That also lies less focus on the quality of OKRs, which sometimes needs 2-3 quarter cycles to get better, but the reason we do OKRs is not to have perfect ones, but to measure them regularly and discuss if our daily work progress against them, and tools forces each team to have formulas to measure them.

Team OKRs should also be aligned to company OKRs, which should be set before team OKRs (the teams have still freedom to set non aligned ones, but first need to work on company OKRs naturally)

Have a clear strategy and company OKRs as guideline, than setting up team OKRs in a tool and having regular measuring meetings gives you the transparency on the results and teams learn from each other how to write better OKRs or we can also give easy guidelines on that. Our advise get a tool and focus on result measurement.

Any questions let us know. Melde dich gerne bei uns!

Best / VG
Carsten

1 Like
5

Thanks for the hint @Hans-Peter_Schreiber ,
we did follwow this approach and gave all the people an OKR experience, common view and rituals cycle during the last year. But we didn’t normalize all the documentation.
This year we had to focus on only a portion of the organisation and the challenge is, to transfer the status of the teams inside the organization. :man_shrugging: