Objectives, Metrics and Targets

How to use OKRs to to set and execute on audacious goals by focusing on the right work to be done.

Our leaders and institutions are failing us, but it's not always because they're bad or unethical, says venture capitalist John Doerr -- often, it's simply because they're leading us toward the wrong objectives. In this practical talk, Doerr shows us how we can get back on track with "Objectives and Key Results," or OKRs -- a goal-setting system that's been employed by the likes of Google, Intel and Bono to set and execute on audacious goals. Learn more about how setting the right goals can mean the difference between success and failure -- and how we can use OKRs to hold our leaders and ourselves accountable.

Common OKR mistakes are all litmus tests to decide: Are you really measuring what matters? Check and see with these common OKR mistakes taken from Google’s OKR playbook.

Objective Key Results (OKRs) help agile teams and companies to measure their success on set objectives towards a certain organizational goal. However, sometimes, the expected business value from the OKRs may depend on how well they have been written. This article explains OKRs and some of the common mistakes that should be avoided when crafting your OKRs for the company.

An analysis of OKRs vs SMART Goals in the perspectives of how the two frameworks relate and differ from each other.

Organizations leverage different frameworks to set and achieve their goals. Some might use the OKR framework to set objectives and strategically work towards them while others rely on SMART Goals to achieve measurable and specific objectives in a predefined period. However, the question is, what prompts some companies to prefer OKRs over SMART Goals and vice versa?

A success story of how OKRs have been implemented outside of a technology-focused organization.

Objectives Key Results (OKRs) have helped countless organizations in the innovation arena thrive by simply setting and enacting strategies and achieving goals. But how have they impacted organizations outside the innovation circle? Learn how a nonprofit firm in the architecture space, the MASS Design Group leveraged the OKR framework to achieve several milestones across the world.

When applied properly, Agile Maturity Metrics can measure improvements of agility at individual, team, and organizational level.

AMMs, or Agile Maturity Metrics, measure individual, team and organizational levels into different buckets - separated by maturity. Though a trusted way to measure improvement, organizations must keep in mind there are ways to game the system, some attributes are conditional, and the correlations between attributes is not linear.

Combining Modern Agile with the proper use of OKR can be a lightweight, joyful way for organizations to help their people achieve awesome results.

When it comes to setting goals, most companies use a top-down approach to create a set of static goals - which are linked with individual or team bonuses and directly conflict with being agile. Its a waterfall command-and-control mindset that turns teams into "feature factories" with no focus on delivering value. Alexandre Freire and Felipe Castro propose the usage of OKRs, which are evaluated frequently and are bidirectional - a bubble-up approach is used to create contracts with the teams. Furthermore, they explain how this can be used in the context of Modern Agile.