OKR is the abbreviation for Objectives and Key Results. OKRs are used as a goal-setting framework for defining objectives and tracking outcomes rather than actions. In the OKR framework, objectives are qualitative statements of what one wants to achieve whilst key results are the quantitative definition of what success looks like.
Why do organisations use OKRs?
Traditionally, at the beginning of the year, organisations set high-level organisational goals. Generally, these are forgotten within a month which leads to passive management. This creates difficulty for leaders to measure and track their employees’ progress and goal-achievement.
To combat this, many organisations have embraced the OKR goal-setting methodology, OKR tracking techniques, and keep their goals aligned utilising tools like ours. The key is to implement a quarterly rhythm across the organisation for the setting of key results and the review of their achievement, specifically the progress to goal.
Our approach to OKRs
We enable your organisation to design and scale OKR’s with speed through a simple yet powerful matrix logic and we offer the technology to make the governance of OKRs effortless whilst keeping everything synchronized across teams.
Here is how it works:
- In your Scientrix system select the relevant Grid and click on the element where you would like to add OKRs.
- Click on the ‘Configure Content’ button and select Key Results. Drag it to the position within the overview page where you’d like to visualise it and click ‘Save’.
- You will now see the Key Results box appear in the overview page.
- Let’s start by adding a new Key Result. Click on ‘Add New’, give it a name and add a responsible, then specify the baseline value that the key result starts with (X). followed by the target value (Y).
- Let’s use a very generic example: If my Objective is “I want to lose weight”, my Key Result could be “I will reduce my weight from 145 lbs. to 130 lbs. in this quarter”. So my baseline X would be 145 lbs and my target Y would be 130 lbs.
- Now define the period for which this Key Result is relevant or valid and click ‘Save’.
- Once saved, your key result can be visualised in the overview page.
You will see a message appear in red “Progress is not working. Please configure weights so they add 100% to fix error.” Here is where you need to assign a weighting factor to each key result for the calculation of the overall Progress to Goal.
Given that we only added one, the weighting factor would be 100%. In the case of multiple key results (we recommend no more than 5 per quarter) you will need to distribute the weighting factors to the sum of 100%. So simply add “100” without any decimals or percentage signs in the “Weight” field. Now you can start editing the key result by in-line editing the actual value.
In this example, if we change the actual to 139 lbs you will see the progress bar automatically updating. You will also see the overall Progress to Goal being updated. You can see the Quarter to date Progress which tracks the Progress to Goal in the current Quarter, and you can see the Year-to-date Progress which tracks the yearly progress to Goal. The YTD Progress to Goal is calculated using each Quarterly progress to Goal multiplied by 25%.
When planning your key results for the rest of the year, you can click on the Q1 to Q4 tabs. To edit or unlink the key result, click on the Action icon on the right.