What is OKR?

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is an acronym that stands for Objectives and Key Results. A company's, department's, or individual's general priorities are examples of objectives. The achievement of that goal is measured by key outcomes. SMART priorities should be the primary outcomes.

Objectives and key results (OKR) is a goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes.

OKRs are made up of a target (a well-stated goal) and 3–5 main outcomes (specific indicators used to track the goal's achievement). The aim of OKR is to determine how to accomplish goals by taking concrete, specific, and observable steps. A 0–100 percent scale or another numerical unit may be used to assess key outcomes (e.g. dollar amount, percent, items, etc.). Initiatives, which are plans and actions that aim to accomplish the goal and advance the main results, should therefore be supported by objectives. 

It's recommended that your target success rate for key results should be 70%. A 70% success rate allows staff to set competitive goals that can challenge them while putting them at low risk. If all of the main outcomes are reliably attained, the outcomes should be reevaluated. 

OKRs should be spread around the enterprise to give teams insight into their priorities, allowing them to collaborate and direct their efforts.

OKRs are usually set at the business, squad, and individual levels, despite criticism that this results in too much of a waterfall approach, which OKRs are designed to prevent in several respects.

Some strategic structures, such as OGSM and Hoshin Kanri's X-Matrix, have some overlap. OGSM, on the other hand, lists "Strategy" as one of its elements. Furthermore, OKRs straddle the line between KPIs and the balanced scorecard, making them compatible with other performance assessment systems.

What is an Objective?

A target is a summary of a potential aim to be accomplished. It is a step taken by a person or an organization to achieve a certain goal. Your organization and team would have a single, clear direction if you set an agenda. In other words, priorities are stepping blocks toward achieving our targets.

What is a Key Result?

What is KPI?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are performance measures that assess an organization's or a specific activity's effectiveness. Projects, schemes, materials, and a host of other initiatives will all benefit from KPIs. They will monitor anything from revenue targets to social media analytics to determine how effective a campaign is.

The precise history of KPIs is uncertain, but calculating success dates back to the third century when the Wei Dynasty (221-265 AD) emperors assessed the performance of official family members. KPIs have been adopted by a large number of organizations and are now used to assess and predict performance.

A KPI, on the other hand, is just as important as the activity it motivates. Companies always want to imitate other companies' KPIs and use them as their own, and ask why their objectives are never accomplished. Each organization is unique, just like every individual is unique. KPIs should be customized to the organization's particular goals, how you want to achieve them, and who will be able to work on the data. KPIs should be customized to the organization's particular goals, how you want to achieve them, and who will be able to work on the data. When drafting their goals and main results, organizations that have effectively used OKRs see that they use basic jargon that is familiar to many of their workers. SMART goals are those that are precise, concrete, actionable, reachable, and time-bound.

What's the difference between an OKR and KPI?

The outcomes of the efforts made for the initiatives currently ongoing are represented by KPI targets. OKRs, on the other hand, should be neither too straightforward nor too difficult to achieve. In other words, they are difficult to accomplish, but once they are, they serve as catalysts for success by growing team and business morale.

OKRs have more depth than KPIs, and they have a stronger platform for taking on new ideas, ventures, and even new market paths. 

And if both have keys, an OKR vs KPI analogy is as distinct as chalk and cheese. One is a mixture that includes the other. OKRs and KPIs are natural partners due to their complementary reach.

To understand the distinctions between KPI and OKR, consider KPIs as lessons learned along the way to progress. Assume you've launched a new company. You'll have to do a lot of different things before you achieve your desired level of progression, and these paths will lead to success or failure. Failures, on the other hand, are the instruments that shape the foundation of performance. They may not, though, deliver it explicitly. To put it another way, OKRs are used to achieve ultimate growth depending on the data contained in KPIs.

How could they work together?

OKRs and KPIs are natural partners due to their complementary reach. Giving examples is the perfect way to demonstrate how they fit together.

For instance, if a help KPI falls below the target, it becomes a Key Result.

Assume you want to assess the effectiveness of your Support staff. You could build a KPI that tracks how long it takes to respond to incoming help tickets on average. If you and Support accept that the average response time should be 30 minutes or less, you'll be able to see if your goal has been reached right away.

Conclusion

Consider your KPI dashboard to be the dashboard of your engine. It tells you how much gasoline you have left, how much diesel you have left if the engine is too hot, and so on. Your navigation app is OKR. You'll need your mapping app to get you to the nearest gas station if your fuel level (KPI) means you're running out of gas.

To put it another way, OKR and KPI complement each other well. OKRs help fix issues, strengthen procedures, and accelerate innovation. KPIs help track success and recognize problems and opportunities for change. You'll need both.

See also

• How to bring down a Scrum team by doing agile
• Where you stand on project management
• Agile and OKR Confusion