Luis Gonçalves's Blog, page 2

The Nightmare of Hiring a Great Product Owner

On LinkedIn at the moment, there are over 3500 available job positions for Product Owners across Germany. Product Owners are very rare and finding a great one is similar to finding a unicorn, an extremely difficult task for executives like you.

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Demand for skilled talents in the digital business space is constantly rising and some crucial and difficult positions such as Product Owners are extremely difficult to fill, more like an endangered species.

We have discussed with several different Product Directors, Heads of Product and other executives, and they have made us to understand how tough it is to find and hire competent Product Owners in the job market.

Skilled and very competent Product Owners hardly leave their current company except if they have to do so for a better opportunity in an attractive company.

Even if you have an attractive position and a great business, the type of compensation Product Owners demand for may be well above what you are willing to offer.

Also, many of the Product Owners who are currently available on the job market or within a company may not have the required skills to effectively drive a product development team.

Worst still, those who have the skills to do so may not have the basic industry background to deliver as expected.

Hiring a skilled and experienced Product Owner who is capable of making a positive impact and initiating business development by offering impeccable customer experience is absolutely difficult.

In many cases, companies had to hire someone who lacks most of the skills they really need and then invest a lot of resources into helping them acquire and build necessary skills.

But why is that so? Let’s find out!

Agile in IT

Many of the companies who use Agile only use it for IT. Agile was actually designed as a solution to the old service-provider paradigm between businesses and IT.

So many things happen between ideation and delivery and a whole lot of time is often wasted before the product ends up with the delivery team.

Agile was designed to provide seamless integration between businesses and technology. However, it didn’t fix the basic challenge, and in the process it created an alternative solution known as Product Owner.

As observed in many situations, the solution is neither the product nor the owner.

Agile’s fundamental focus is delivery not exploration or business growth.

As such, at best companies boast of teams that can deliver very fast, over and over again and increasingly.

But nobody really wants the products their delivering. In the end, Agile only succeeded in creating Product Owners who are only professionals in delivery and implementing instructions.

Project Managers Based on Orders

Many Heads of Product, Product Managers, and Chief Product Officers are interested in hiring people with some specific skills in the job market that is extremely difficult to find.

These include skills of Strategy, traditional Product Management, Marketing, Sales, and Business integrated with cutting-edge mindset and procedures from Lean Startup, Lean UX, Agile and Lean.

As it is right now, many Product Owners have a project management or a technical background and they don’t have the skills to design products customers will fall in love with.

Their experience and professional background is on delivery not product development. At best, they are effective at executing instructions. Someone gives them an order and they go ahead to implement it.

At their best, they end up with a Business Case. At worst, they end up with projects.

It is not a common case for Product Owners to be assigned strategic objectives and they are the ones responsible for building business case and authenticating it repeatedly with clients and unveiling MVPs until they attain Product-Market Fit.

A New Paradigm  

Most of the Product Owners have a project management background or an engineering background. As such, they do not have essential management skills.

Nonetheless, many of these Product Owners do not need management skills as a result of how their companies are organised. They are expected to work as instruction takers, delivery managers or backlog administrators.

So how exactly can they cope if they decide to look for other jobs beyond their current job scope and consider other real digital product organisation?

Or what if the firms they currently work for restructures their business models to become a real customer-centered product organisation?

For companies to become genuinely agile and thrive in digital era, they have to organise for products and make the most out of the role of the Product Owner  by transforming them into real Product Managers with absolute responsibility for building products customers will love in order to achieve business goals.

If you’re running a digital business, it is absolutely crucial to ensure that the Product Owner and Product Manager is the same individual.

If you decide to separate this role into two different positions, you may end up stopping your team from evolving and constantly create value for your company, clients or customers.

Also, the extra duties of the product manager are what allow effective product owners to make better decisions in a product company and they are what is usually missing in the job market.

Our Approach

Many managers and executives like you are concerned about the skills of their Product Owners and how hard it is to find the right talent in the job market. If you’re one of such, we have good news for you.

We have designed specific program that will ensure you get the type of great Product Owners you need. In fact, our program is designed to help you successfully develop great Product Owners within your firm.

Our program was designed with the help of consultants and expert product coaches with the ultimate aim of saving you crucial resources such as money and time required to bring in contemporary product management competences into your organisation.

If you want to know more, feel free to contact us at info@evolution4all.com.

LEAN PRODUCT MANAGEMENT GUIDE

We have developed a Product Management Guide to help you understand How to successfully apply Lean StartUp practices to deliver better products to market faster.

Download The Guide Now!

The post The Nightmare of Hiring a Great Product Owner appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

Outsourcing Software Development Best Practices

Product development is a long and laborious process. Sometimes, you have to get new features out the door so you can launch your product right away and start raising money. And because of this more and more companies are using Outsourcing Software Development services to help them to reduce the time to market.

As you are reading this, maybe you have just achieved a new milestone for your company. After a few months or years of working hard, you’ve finally gained some traction. Your business is scaling up too fast. You’re nailing and crushing it.

But then problems start to come out on the surface. Customers are demanding more. They want faster service and more features. Your engineers who used to easily crank up new features are now missing deadlines. They’re having a hard time pulling off great ideas to make your product better.

Customers are growing and the systems seem to be slowing down. More and more are complaining about performance issues and bugs. And it seems that your engineers cannot keep up. You’ve thought about hiring more people. But you’ve got so much on your plate already.

When you are building a company, you have to make a lot of sacrifices. As your business grows, new processes are created and operations get more complex to meet the increasing demands of your customers.

There is never enough time, money, or talent to get all things done. Companies, especially in tech fields, constantly struggle with having to move fast and deliver top-notch products and services.

That is why many businesses tap into other companies to outsource. Business outsourcing has been around for decades, and it continues to be a major trend among companies, particularly in the tech industry.

Product Management and Software Development: The Big Clash. While product management and software development should go hand in hand, often, they end up on a clash. Why?

Product managers and software developers, while working on the same product, have different goals and processes. Product managers are more concerned about things that concern the customers, such as the user-friendliness of an app or software. On the other hand, engineers are more concerned about technical implementation. Product managers decide on what features to have while engineers are down there working on how to make those features possible.

This communication barrier usually results in wasted time, money and effort, especially if you don’t have enough engineers on staff. Software development is not an easy feat. It takes a series of product updates, coding and testing to create a fully functional software that has all the features and qualities that product managers aim for.

Software development outsourcing is the process by which an organisation hires a third-party company to handle tasks or projects that are related to software development which could have been done in-house. Currently, 60% of companies in the outsourcing market are from the IT/software fields.

The major reason for software development outsourcing is to hand out essential businesses processes so that you can focus on more complex tasks and be able to manage your organisation from top to bottom. In this post, we’ll talk about the major advantages of outsourcing software development, what you need to know about it, and the mistakes you should avoid when outsourcing this critical process.

Why software development outsourcing?

There are many reasons why companies choose to outsource software development.

Cost

Perhaps the biggest advantage of outsourcing software development is to minimise cost. It saves companies, on average, 30% on operating costs. Outsourcing reduces the cost associated with recruitment, training, and talent retention.

Additionally, businesses can save on investment as they do not need to spend some more on developing infrastructure. Software development is an expensive process. It requires specialised technology, tools, and infrastructure. The partner who takes on the outsourced work makes all the necessary infrastructural changes needed to get the job done.

Access to Top Talent

One of the major reasons why many businesses choose to outsource software development is that it allows them to tap into the best pool of talent. Everything, from development to deployment is taken care of by a team of highly skilled engineers who get to focus their time, attention, and resources to one project at a time.

Better Focus on Core Business

Initially, your engineers are able to develop features and address technical problems in a timely manner. But as your company grows, so as the tasks that your engineers need to get done. Outsourcing software development enables a company to focus on strengthening core processes.

It allows your in-house engineering staff to focus on key tasks and responsibilities by freeing their plates with tasks that don’t match their skill levels. In turn, you are able to allocate more time and resources to other matters that are equally important in achieving your business goals.

Risk Management

You are told not to put all your eggs in one basket. When investing, it is recommended to diversify portfolio rather than put all your money in one place. It has a similar effect on outsourcing key processes. By splitting components of operations among different vendors, you are lessening risks that could be associated with many factors, such as the cost.

Increased Efficiency

Not having enough talent is most probably the reason why you are considering outsourcing software development. You understand how important it is to have sufficient in-house resources to get things done, especially when it comes to product development as delays can result in lost revenues.

Hiring new employees often take time. Add the fact that you still have to train them. Outsourcing ensures efficiency in core processes because you skip all the tedious tasks of recruiting, hiring, and training people. You can also ensure that your requests are delivered in a timely manner.

It is the outsourcing company that is responsible for keeping up with client demands. Additionally, software products require regular maintenance and support. Having a dedicated team who will focus on this area is going to save you time and cost.

Security of Data and Infrastructure

Your in-house engineers will be freed from tedious tasks, which means they can focus on high-level projects. They can effectively tackle issues, such as the safety of your data and infrastructure. Your in-house team can also help project managers in creating features that best serve the interest of your customers.

Companies that Outsource their Software Development

Aside from the benefits mentioned above, software development outsourcing can be a powerful tool for driving growth and innovation, especially in the early stages of a company. While many companies seek to outsource this key process to save on costs, more are doing it to boost innovation and optimise their processes.

Let us see how software development outsourcing has become a key driver for success for many business organisations.

Google

It can be surprising to know that a giant (perhaps the biggest) tech company that has all the funding, technology, and infrastructure, is outsourcing its software development. Well, they have been doing it for some time.

In 2011, Google outsourced its customer support process for AdWords. And in 2016, they outsourced software maintenance and development projects to third-party technology vendors.

Skype

A pioneer to video calling, who doesn’t know or hasn’t used Skype? The company has worked with third-party companies to develop the app’s backend to cater to business clients worldwide. Skype was such a massive innovation, which was created with the help of a tech vendor.

Basecamp

This company started out slowly until they decide to outsource the development and refining of its product to freelance developers. It was originally a web consulting service which has evolved into a popular project management software.

Alibaba

The world’s largest online marketplace also achieved greater heights with the help of outsourcing. They outsourced much of their website’s early development to a third-party company as they found it difficult to find local programmers.

By outsourcing the back-end development of the site, Alibaba was able to compete with Amazon and eBay – two of the largest online marketplaces in the world.

Software Development Outsourcing: What Options Do You Have

Outsourcing key tasks to talented developers in Eastern Europe is far cheaper than in other countries. But the cost isn’t the only thing that your organisation has to consider when outsourcing software development.

Managing your outsourcing team can be a challenging task.

Problems like language barriers, conflicting time zones, communication issues with remote teams, process adjustments, decision rights, and authority, and failed expectations are just among the many challenges that come with managing the outsourcing of software engineers.

Outsourcing is not as easy as it seems. It isn’t just you hiring someone, telling them what you want, and then presto – you’re good to go. Remember how diversified portfolio in investing works? You don’t just invest. You nurture your investment so that it grows.

The same thing with outsourcing. Your goal is not simply to find software engineers and assign them work. The inability to manage your outsourcing team can result in failures, postponed product launches (or no launches at all), and loss of time and money.

Below you can find  some critical steps to prepare for software development outsourcing.

Determine your internal team’s strengths and weaknesses

Acknowledging the need to outsource tasks is not enough. It is important to be clear about what functions or processes are better outsourced. To do this, you first need to understand what skills your internal software development team has.

What specific tasks or functions are better left in their hands? What are their weaknesses? What are the skill gaps? Maybe your internal team is well-versed with back-end development but lack skill in quality assurance. Additionally, determine what specific skills are required and their availability.

Create a process guideline

This is perhaps the most tedious part of outsourcing. Basically, you want to be clear about what you want and what you expect from the vendor. There has to be a contract and NDAs to protect the security of your information.

Decide what’s best for your company and see to it that your best interest is taken care of. Additionally, you want to tackle how your internal team and outsourcing team will communicate, determine tools and collaboration platforms to use, and many other things. Additionally, you must be able to assign roles so all team members (both internal and external) will know who they will report to and who needs an update on a specific area.

Define decision rights and authority

Knowing who makes decisions is the most common source of contention. Often, internal teams assume that they have authority and decision rights. However, some rights are actually transferred to the outsourcing team as part of the outsourcing agreement.

Supervise work.

Trust is the basis of any outsourcing project, whether it’s software-related or not. When you hire offshore developers, you don’t have to check on them every hour or ask for an update real-time. It doesn’t help them. Rather, it could cause tension among your outsourcing team members which can just negatively affect their performance.

To avoid micromanaging, it is important to plan ahead and lay down your goals and what you expect from them. Set schedules for regular meetings and update, and identify persons to tap into for urgent requests or correspondence.

Select a time-tracking tool

Ensuring the productivity of your outsourcing team is very important. Of course, you want to know how much time is being spent on specific tasks so you can adjust expenses accordingly. There are so many tools out there. Find the one that works best for your team and help your outsourcing developers to get familiarised with it.

Mistakes when Outsourcing Software Development

There are some mistakes that many businesses do when outsourcing software development. These mistakes, when not spotted and fixed early on, can lead to failures, added costs, and delays in product launching.

Poor change management

The very first challenge that many organisations encounter when outsourcing key processes is the lack of buy-in from internal members, which can take form in either active or passive resistance. Even managers suffer from it.

They might think that their job is at risk or that they may lose control for tasks they are accountable for that are shifted to an external partner. To avoid this, it is necessary not to neglect the management team in the change of your management plans.

Doing the selection process on their own

Many companies choose an outsourcing partner based mainly on the price. While cost is undoubtedly an important factor to consider, it is not by far the only one. It is important to conduct thorough research and analysis to determine the monetary and non-monetary values of outsourcing. There are hundreds of outsourcing companies out there.

If you are considering software development outsourcing, you may benefit from having someone do the analysis and selection for you. Basically, you want to make sure that your message is communicated properly and that the software engineers who will work with you are on the same page when it comes to your product development goals.

Lack of clear goals and requirements.

Whether it’s software development or not, it is important to be clear about your goals and requirements before embarking on outsourcing important processes. The success of any outsourcing project greatly depends on the relationship between the company and the outsourcing team. To ensure that everyone is geared towards the same path, each team has to be aware of job requirements.

The internal team must have a full understanding of why outsourcing is necessary. At the same time, the outsourcing vendor must know what is expected of them. Everything has to be understandable from both sides, from the costs to the standards, quality, and timelines.

Poor communication

Communication is crucial in the success of projects, internal or outsourced ones. It is not enough that your requirements are clear and properly communicated in the beginning. It is equally important to continue the collaboration to know what’s going on and whether the requirements are being met in a timely manner.

With so many collaboration tools available these days, the distance is never an issue to maintain strong communication between teams. You can arrange regular meetings and know what the outsourcing team is doing, what they need to do, and whether there are challenges that lie ahead. Losing track of things can lead to undesirable results which can obviously have a negative impact on the project.

Leaving all responsibilities to the vendor

You’re outsourcing software development because you find it more practical, convenient, and effective. But it doesn’t mean to say that once you found a team to work on it, your business is done. No one cares about the project more than you do.

Even if you outsource it to a third-party company, it is still your project and your responsibility. Just as you work hard with your internal team, you also want to establish buy-in from your partner. Additionally, you don’t want to let go of all your internal engineers and outsource everything to your vendor.

Stick to what your internal software development team is good at. Through careful analysis, you can determine which tasks are better left to your internal engineers and which ones can be outsourced.

Not paying attention to culture misfit

Organisational culture refers to the company’s way of working, the values they adhere to, and their behaviour at work. Cultural barriers are among the common problems with offshore outsourcing. While the language barrier is the most obvious obstacle, it is not by far the only one.

Cultural differences, which include gestures, intonations, norms, traditions, and customs can spark a lot of conflicts between your company and your vendor. They all impact not only the relationship between both teams but also everyone’s productivity and performance.

How can you address cultural misfit?

The answer could be cultural awareness and resource deployment. Cultural awareness can be achieved through workshops to ensure that the cultural practices of both the internal and external software development teams are aligned.

Meanwhile, culturally compatible resource deployment involves having an onsite person manage the onshore client relationship. While you ideally want your vendor to learn how to work with your team, there’s also nothing wrong with learning how to work with them.

Lack of flexibility over product features

Before outsourcing the project, having a full vision of what features you want for your product is important. However, in software development, things don’t always go the way as planned. During the process, there’s a big possibility that not all the features you require will be relevant or reasonable.

For a successful outcome, you want to be flexible. As long as the core functionality of the product is preserved, when it comes to additional features, there should be someplace for compromising. Who knows, these changes can result in significant improvements?

Setting unrealistic timelines

Timelines are crucial to any project. Despite the desire to launch the product or add the required features soon, you must work within a realistic timeframe. Many companies that outsource tend to set overly high expectations and unreasonable timeline which greatly impacts the project outcome.

It is important to discuss and decide on how and when the project has to be completed. Even so, you still want to give leeway for reasonable delays as some unpredictable things can happen during the software development process.

Not having enough protection

When you outsource, you are making your company vulnerable against potential security threats. Intellectual property includes business plans, trade secrets, processes, and other proprietary knowledge – all of which are susceptible to security threats like theft and data hacking.

To make things more complicated, different countries have different legal systems and sometimes, contradicting rules on intellectual property. To mitigate the risks, it is necessary to develop stringent guidelines and protocols on data security and management when outsourcing.

These include protocols when accessing information, protecting buildings and equipment against unauthorised access, making use of secure mailing system, as well as administrative safeguards that lay out the policies and procedures of operations, the use of security controls, and the conduct of employees.

Best Practices for Software Development

Outsourcing software development can be a great tool towards innovation and business success. But what specific steps can you take to ensure things run smoothly?

Leverage technology for better collaboration and coordination

Earlier we emphasised the importance of communication in outsourcing. Your vendor could be located in another part of the world and the only way to work together is to communicate via technology. Leveraging the right technology to facilitate coordination and collaboration can streamline communications and ensure smooth management of offshore software development teams.

Platforms like Skype, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Slack, and Trello can make it easy for companies to manage internal and external teams.

Determine who gets control

Outsourcing involves freeing up internal resources so they can be deployed for more strategic tasks. Oftentimes, these tasks are less critical in nature in terms of priority. Because of this, many companies that outsource choose to transfer full project control to their outsourcing partner.

Nonetheless, while it is important to segregate the avenues of control, as the real owner of the process, you have to oversee all the affairs of your vendor.

Address conflicting processes

Software development involves both technical and managerial decisions. Outsourcing software development presents an extra challenge because everything is performed in an inter-organisational context.

While collaboration ensures that job expectations are clear, both the internal and external teams have their own interests and needs, which can result in conflicts. Add the tacit requirements, knowledge-domain gaps, and communication barriers, there could be a lot of hurdles along the way.

Basically, you want to achieve synergy between your team and your offshore engineers. Best practices for managing conflicts include being clear about the details of existing coding architecture and figuring out whether there will be any software migration in the near future.

Additionally, create a risk mitigation process that should cover how conflicts should be addressed.

Integrate cultural fit

As we discussed early on, culture misfit usually exists between companies and their outsourcing partners. Things like ways of working, cultural holidays, and workplace norms often lead to communication issues and conflicts.

Add the lack of face-to-face interactions that often complicate issues and create misunderstandings. While it is possible, it can be difficult to find a vendor whose culture matches that of your organisation. That is why relationship management should be observed all throughout.

Measure progress, output, and performance

Quality assurance is central to any outsourcing initiative. Lack of quality in your software product can result in chaos and utterly hurt your company reputation, even if it was the fault of your vendor. How do you ensure that your offshore team is doing the right thing and keeping up with your expectations?

Quality management is a key practice for outsourcing software development. Typically, QMS consists of Standard Operating Procedures, protocols, templates, and guidelines that govern the development of the project which both your internal and external engineers should fully adhere to.

In addition to the QMS, testing policies should also be implemented. These include creating a test strategy and plan that will ensure product quality throughout its development. Defining coding standards and automated measurements for validating the standards, conducting peer reviews involving both the internal and external team members.

And continually integrating and testing code to find potential defects. Implementing quality assurance throughout the product development process promotes predictable project delivery.

Safeguard data and intellectual property

Key practices to protect information and intellectual property include signing NDAs, consulting a lawyer to understand policy gaps (if there are any) and incorporating clauses in the contract that forbids the vendor from reusing your code and requiring them to transfer all ownership rights of the code onto you.

Below you have some of the best practices for protecting intellectual property

Assess applications at risk

Create an inventory of the applications or programs that are being developed or maintained by your vendor. This should involve coordinating not only with the procurement team but also to each business unit as application sprawl can take place when individuals or teams bypass the procurement process to get new ideas off the ground. Each application should undergo a risk assessment to know the risks it poses to your organisation.

Test for quality

Assign a quality assurance team for each application or development process that will keep track of risk factors, such as disclosure of sensitive information, financial loss, and operational risks. Additionally, define the degree of security testing that each application requires and the acceptable threshold that it must reach to be ready for deployment.

Review your vendor’s security capabilities

Your outsourcing partner should be able to meet your standards and expectations in data and IP security. They should have the technology, infrastructure, coding architecture, and certifications to protect your information.

Review their security policies, including how they perform security checks and monitoring. Moreover, be clear about who will conduct security tests (which is different from operational and functional testing) and whose methods and tools will be used.

Summary

Outsourcing software development can have many significant advantages for your business. These include reduced costs, access to top talents, better risk management, and increased work efficiency. Moreover, it allows your company to focus on more important tasks and facilitate rapid business growth.

Nonetheless, outsourcing is not an easy feat. There are critical steps that should be done before outsourcing software development.

These are:

Determining the internal team’s strengths and weaknesses
Creating a process guideline
Defining roles, decision rights, and authority
Supervising work
Selecting a time-tracking tool

There are common mistakes that many companies commit when outsourcing software development. When not spotted and fixed early on, can lead to failures, added costs, and delays in product launching.

These are:

Poor change management
Doing the selection process on their own
Lack of clear goals and requirements
Poor communication
Leaving all responsibilities to the vendor
Not paying attention to culture misfit
Lack of flexibility over product features
Setting unrealistic timelines
Not having enough protection

There are significant practices that will help your organisation achieve great results when outsourcing software development.

These are:

• Leverage technology for better collaboration and coordination

• Determine who gets control

• Address conflicting processes

• Integrate cultural fit

• Measure progress, output, and performance

• Safeguard data and intellectual property

• Assess applications at risk

• Test for quality

• Review your vendor’s security capabilities

Software development outsourcing is a brilliant way to meet the growing needs of your organisation. By adhering to these best practices, you can be sure that your outsourcing requirements are done in the way you want.

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OKR Framework, A Summary Of What You Need To Know

OKR Framework

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a popular goal setting framework that helps organisations implement a solid strategy.

The goal of OKRs is for every member of the organisation – from the key stakeholders and leaders down to the team members – understand the objectives of the company through a set of defined, specific and measurable actions.

The OKR approach has been used by many multibillion companies like Google, LinkedIn, Amazone, Adobe, etc.

Because of today’s complex nature of organisations, stakeholders often feel lost when they deal with rapid changes in the organisations.

It happens often that strategic goals and plans in the organisation are too sophisticated, unclear, and abstract. Because of that, many employees feel lost, discouraged and have a lack of purpose.

Let´s take a look how we can prevent or improve employees getting a lost and unmotivated.

Background of OKRs

You might have heard that the concept of OKR is not new. The OKR history started in 1954 when Peter Drucker invented Management by Objectives or so called MBO.

In early 1979s it was introduced to the former President of Intel, Andy Grove.

Now, OKRs are gaining popularity not only among big corporations, but also among small organisations as well as start-ups.

OKRs help these organisations achieve their goals in a much shorter period of time and accurately measure progress.

Typically, OKR is made up of 3-5 high-level objectives, which list 3-5 key measurable results. Key Results (KRs) are measurable through a defined set of scores (usually between 0 and 1.0).

The use of these scores allow organisations to check or measure progress.

For your company, you can start adding OKR as a part of quarterly planning and progress review. However, you can also do it on a monthly or annual basis, it depends what are the needs and goals of your organisation.

OKR Benefits

Leadership experts believe that OKR is one of the leading team management practices and goal setting framework that every company should implement.

Why use OKRs? Because it’s easy and simple and it does not take up so much resources to ramp up.

Moreover, it helps sustain the company culture and largely benefits the organisation, particularly employee productivity and performance.

In my opinion, OKR brings two major benefits into organisations:

1. Impact on Your Business

Studies have shown that employees who used OKR tend to be more effective at their jobs, which results to better performance and increased sales.

Moreover, team members who didn’t use OKRs proactively asked to be part of the OKR process in future cycles.

2. Company/Organisation Culture Benefits

One of the major OKR benefits is that it allows an organisation to focus on metrics and KPIs. This makes a cultural shift from output to outcomes.

OKRs also create focus, alignment and transparency within the organisation. When combined, these factors lead to a significant improvement in employee engagement.

OKR Framework Overview

Each element of the OKR framework supports the successful Objective and Key Results implementation, and that´s why it has an important meaning in the overall process.

It is best to use the synergy effects of all elements as shown on the picture below.

Company Mission

The company mission is a brief description of the company’s vision and purpose, and how they should be implemented.

Mid-term Goals

Mid-term goals (so-called MOALS) are the link between the company mission and the OKR. They are usually defined for one year.

OKR Planning

OKR Planning allows the respective objectives and key results become defined for the entire cycle at all levels. This is done both top-down and bottom-up.

OKR Weekly

The OKR Weekly helps to integrate the implementation of the OKR framework and supports the team to be responsible for it during the cycle. The weekly should only take about 15 minutes and should give an overview of the current status of the OKR.

OKR Review

Review meetings are used to determine the degree of achievement at the end of an evaluation cycle. The scoring should be consistent with team standards.

OKR Retrospective

During a retrospective, the teams inspects the OKR process from a systematic point of view. What did the team learn and what should be improved in the next cycle.

OKR Coach

OKR Coaches are responsible for the smooth implementation of the OKR and support their teams in the Definition of OKRs and other events.

The Cycle Of The OKR Framework

Each cycle of the OKR framework has many opportunities for improving teamwork, communication and strategic goals. The following events help:

OKR Planning
OKR Weekly
OKR Review
OKR Retrospectives

During the cycle, objectives and key results do not usually change unless the company faces an unexpected and important event to which it must respond.

As this is rare, usually review and retrospective usually show the opportunity for improvement for the next cycle.

The sustainable implementation of the OKR framework within a company takes time. It usually takes about 3-4 cycles to get the full pull from OKR.

A meaningful, well-designed implementation plan can significantly reduce the learning process.

Measures such as in-house trainings, the training of OKR Coaches, orientation workshops, or review and retrospectives increase the learning quality and speed.

It´s important to note: The key is to always stay humble and open for learning and making mistakes!

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

Take The Test

If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

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How Many Objectives Should Your Company Have to Become Efficient?

How Many Objectives Should Your Company Have to Become Efficient?

Companies like Google, Intel and LinkedIn have many things in common. They are all tech giants. They make billions of revenues each year. They are known all over the world. They have thousands of happy employees and millions of satisfied customers.

They know who they are. They do what they do best. They know where they’re headed.

Let´s dive into insights on how many objectives should your company really have to become efficient.

OKR: Giant Companies’ Secret Sauce

The success of these companies can have many reasons. But in his book “Measure What Matters”, John Doerr talked about the ‘secret sauce’ all these tech giants have: Objectives and Key Results (OKR).

It isn’t a new concept. It has been around decades ago. And despite the arrival of many other management concepts and leadership principles, OKR as a goal-setting framework remains to be one of the most powerful organisation tools available these days.

OKRs are meant not only for a company to have a clear view of where they want to be or what they want to accomplish in the next few months or quarter.

In essence, it’s a way of running your company to its fullest potential. It creates focus, accountability and prioritisation. It aligns team efforts so that everyone is working on the same goal.

So how do these companies do it? Read more below.

Setting Your Objectives Right

For OKRs to be successful, everything has to start with the objectives. In a nutshell, objectives are simply your goals.

They answer the question “WHAT”. As an executive, you can have a higher-level set of objectives or more specific ones.

CEOs would have broader objectives as their roles encompass many aspects of the organisation while teams and business units may have a more limited scope when setting objectives as theirs would depend mainly on the department or management team that they support.

But regardless of what kind of objectives you need to make, you should make sure that they are clear, concise, and specific.

For example, your run a booking company and your goal for the month is to increase your revenue by 15%.

This is your objective. When setting an objective, you want to challenge yourself and, in a sense, push yourself to your limits by getting a little more ambitious. That’s the essence of OKRs.

You don’t set goals simply to sustain the status quo. You want to be one or two levels higher than where you were a month or a quarter before. As Google puts it, if you’re doing too well, you’re sandbagging it!

OKR – How Many Objectives?

Does this even matter? Wouldn’t it be much better if you can set as many objectives as you can? After all, you have many people to support you. Isn’t it that if you have a lot of objectives, you will have a lot of accomplishments?

Sounds logical. But actually, OKRs don’t work that way.

Limiting the number of objectives between 3 and 5 is the best way. And that’s not simply because it’s the way Google or Intel does it.

First of all, you should know that OKRs are meant for shorter, greater impact goals. Each objective should have a completion date. In most companies, OKRs are created every quarter. For what reasons?

OKRs drive prioritisation.

The main reason why you want to have fewer objectives is because you want to really focus on what matters. You may want to accomplish so many things for your company but without efficient prioritisation, you won’t be able to quickly advance.

The same thing will happen to the teams and individual members of your company. They could be working on so many things just to catch up with their OKRs but there’s a lesser chance that they would be able to get things done at the end of the quarter.

When implementing OKRs, you want to do it slowly but surely. Before the quarter starts, call for a meeting with the key stakeholders. Brainstorm on the most important goals based on your organisational OKRs. Other things can wait in the coming quarter.

OKRs are time-bound.

OKRs are ambitious but they should also be realistic. When setting objectives, take into consideration the timeframe given to your teams or employees.

If you are having quarterly OKRs, then you want your objectives to be something that are achievable in three months.

OKRs are meant to be flexible.

Setting long-term goals are important and should be incorporated into your high-level organisational objectives. That’s why annual OKRs are widely practised.

But quarterly OKRs are inevitable because they are meant to be fluid, not rigid. Thus, when circumstances change and other unexpected things happen, you can easily tweak your objectives to ensure that your team could adapt.

What OKR Pioneers Say
Try setting one OKR at a time.

Christina Wodtke, an American businesswoman and OKR expert, claim that companies should just make one objective and key results.

This is a good approach especially if you’re just starting out and still getting familiar with how OKR works. Because there is only one, it is more likely to be high-level. Example:

Objective: Grow my business’ profit by 10%

Key Results:

   Put up a marketing team and hire a new VP by the end of the third quarter.
   Increase monthly revenues by 10%.
   Promote website on social media and increase customer engagement by 50%.

Maximum of 5 Objectives

John Doerr suggests having a maximum of 5 objectives with four key results underneath each one. In his deck presented by Rick Klau of Google Venture, Doerr provided some guidelines when setting OKRs:

     Maximum of 5 objectives with 4 key results.
     60% + objectives from the bottom up.
     No one should dictate. All must mutually agree.
     One-page OKR is best. 2 pages maximum
     OKRs should not be used as performance measures.
     When grading, 60-70% means “GOOD” and 100% means “BAD”.
     Continue incomplete KRs only when they are still relevant and useful.

By combining both Wodtke’s and Doerr’s ideas, you can definitely determine the ideal number of objectives that will work for your company. Again, less is more. It drives focus and prioritisation and leads to high-impact results.

Now that you know how to set OKR, let’s find out other aspects of your company’s growth that can be optimised. Check out our Organisational Mastery Quiz – a proprietary quiz that lets you unravel optimisation opportunities for your company. Easy five-minute quiz.

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

Take The Test

If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post How Many Objectives Should Your Company Have to Become Efficient? appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

OKRs Examples to Help Your Company Set Effective Goals

It’s not enough that you have goals for your company. If your numbers are not moving the graphs up, clearly it’s either you’re targeting the wrong goals or the way you set goals isn’t helping you to go the right direction. Implementing OKRs is a great way to make sure you are moving into the right direction, and to help you to start with this journey we will provide you some OKRs examples.

THE ULTIMATE OKR GUIDE

Do you want to know more about OKRs? We wrote a white paper that summarises everything that you need to know in order to start using OKRs in your company! Do not wait any longer and download your white paper now.

Download The White-Paper

The way companies sets goal matters. It may seem trivial but having an ineffective goal setting framework affects many companies like yours in impactful ways.

Another telltale sign that your goal setting method isn’t helping your company to reach its optimal performance is when your departments and teams are uncoordinated while missing deadlines left and right, working on different unrelated projects, and uncertain about the collective directions that you set for your company.

As the leader of your company, if you want to fix this, you have to focus on the heart of the problem – your goal-setting framework. This is where OKR steps in.

Using Objective and Key Results (OKRs) is probably the easiest and most efficient way of setting company goals. Big companies like Google, Intel and Zynga have been using it for a long time. They all recommend this framework to any organisation that wishes to scale up fast and drive promising results in their undertakings.

Right below, you can get some overview of this framework plus objectives and key results examples to help you understand how to write it effectively.

What is Objective and Key Results (OKRs) ?

Objectives are statements of a company or individual’s goal for a specific period of time. They answer the question “Where do I want to go?”.

Before writing your objectives, take note of its following characteristics:

    It should be exact and specific.
    It should be easily understandable.
    It must be brief and straight to the point.
    It must be tangible.

Key Results bring your company closer to its stated objectives. They are your stepping stone. Completing each key result means being one step closer to your objectives. Below are the key qualities of the most efficient KRs:

    They are significant. They’re not just a to-do list. They are results of those small steps taken that make up an objective.
    KRs should be easily understood without the need to interpret.
    They are time-bound. There’s always a due date for every key result.
    KRs are scalable.

Ready “Why use OKRs” for more insights on why OKR benefits will improve your organisation.

OKR Best Practices

Writing down your OKRs for the first time can be challenging. You may have many doubts. Are you doing it right? Are you setting specific goals and key results? Are your OKRs ambitious yet achievable?

OKR at Google – ne of the best OKR practices by Google and many other organisations is writing down 3-5 objectives per level (e.g. per person, per team, or per department).

Going above this limit can be counterproductive as it could cause you or your team to be distracted with so many things to do. OKRs are a great tool for prioritisation.

Since you only get to work on a few objectives per quarter, say for instance, you will be able to allocate your time, efforts and resources properly.

Another best practice when writing OKRs is to use common language that your team understands. Contrary to your company mission and vision, OKRs are specific and measurable. While they are inspirational, they have to be clearly understood by anyone in your team.

If your OKR statements trigger confusion among your employees, you need to revise it.

OKRs Examples

Check out the following objective and key results examples as a guide to come up with your own:

Example #1

Objective: Lower Attrition Rate by 10%.

Key Results:

    Drive engagement among team members through an incentive program.
    Facilitate bi-weekly coaching sessions to low performers.
    Create an upskilling program for members who want to develop their skills.

Example #2

Objective: Make our customers happy.

Key Results:

    Conduct a monthly survey to get customers’ feedback.
    Perform a weekly calibration session for QA involving selected team members.
    Increase customer retention by 85-95%.
    Obtain an NPS score of 9.

Example #3

Objective: Establish a friendly, “family” like Company Culture.

Key Results:

    Achieve a 95% score in monthly employee PULSE survey.
    Expand employee recognition program.
    Launch a monthly Town Hall wherein employees can openly ask managers and leaders about anything and talk about their concerns.
    Celebrate small wins and progress each week.

Example #4

Objective: Raise revenues by 20%.

Key Results:

    Offer 40% discount for two consecutive weeks.
    Join at least 10 mall bazaars this month.
    Reduce distribution cost by 15%.
    Re-calculate product cost and markup.

Example #5

Objective: Improve the training process.

Key Results:

    Put up a dedicated L&D Team.
    Centralise training process for all departments and teams.
    Create a playbook for the new training process.
    Assign an L&D Representative for each department.

Example #6

Objective: Open 25 stores by December 2018

Key Results:

    Complete all necessary permits and documents for all 25 locations by February.
    Buy materials and start store renovation/construction by March.
    Promote stores opening via radio and television until launch.

Example #7

Objective: Hold company-wide retreat in September.

Key Results:

    Ensure funding will be properly allocated for the company-wide retreat
    Double production by 20% to reach quota that will cover the expenses for the retreat
    Hire and train sub-contractors to participate in the production while employees on the retreat

Example #8

Launch company cross-skilling to support seasonal roles.

Key Results:

    Identify a pilot group for the cross-skilling experiment.
    Create a cross-skilling playbook that can be used by any department or team.
    Identify key responsibilities of team leaders and POCs.
    Assess scores (QA and productivity) of the cross-skilling pilot group.

Example #9

Objective: Grow the company 4X bigger!

Key Results:

    Speed up hiring process without compromising quality.
    Hire 100 employees by end of the year.
    Hire a new Marketing VP by August.

Example #10

Objective: Improve our SEO

Key Results:

    Improve website design. Incorporate relevant tags and backlinks.
    Increase website loading speed by 95%.
    Invite guest bloggers and hire content writers to regularly update the site.
    Assign a dedicated online marketing team to monitor our SEO ranking.

Example #11

Objective: Increase Monthly Newsletter Engagement Rate by 50%.

Key Results:

    Revamp the layout of newsletter.
    Add more contents that customers will find useful, apart from the regular product updates and special offers.
    Feature one interesting article each time.

More Tips to Writing Good OKRs

If you liked this article, feel free to visit our OKR Training, OKR Consulting.

    Get insights from your employees. Their feedback is valuable for you to come up with challenging OKRs that truly make an impact to your company. Hold a meeting that is dedicated for brainstorming OKRs per team.
    Pull up your historical data. When setting objectives, you want to look at your company’s historical data. It will guide you in coming up with realistic “stretch” goals and key results, especially when you’re looking to increase numbers such as profits, staffing, and the like.
    OKRs is a “bottom-up” process. Empowering employees to make their own OKRs is one of the best ways to drive engagement, get buy-in, and ensure that everyone is working together to achieve the overall goals of the company.
    Be clear about your KRs. Use common words that everyone will understand. If anything seems vague, edit or revise it.
    Setting goals is a key organisational process. With these objectives and key results examples, you should be able to draft your own in no time!



THE ULTIMATE OKR GUIDE

Do you want to know more about OKRs? We wrote a white paper that summarises everything that you need to know in order to start using OKRs in your company! Do not wait any longer and download your white paper now.

Download The White-Paper

If you liked this article, feel free to visit our OKR Training, OKR Consulting.

The post OKRs Examples to Help Your Company Set Effective Goals appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

Objective and Key Results Examples to Help Your Company Set Effective Goals

Objective and Key Results Examples

It’s not enough that you have goals for your company. If your numbers are not moving the graphs up, clearly it’s either you’re targeting the wrong goals or the way you set goals isn’t helping you to go the right direction.

The way companies sets goal matters. It may seem trivial but having an ineffective goal setting framework affects many companies like yours in impactful ways.

Another telltale sign that your goal setting method isn’t helping your company to reach its optimal performance is when your departments and teams are uncoordinated while missing deadlines left and right, working on different unrelated projects, and uncertain about the collective directions that you set for your company.

As the leader of your company, if you want to fix this, you have to focus on the heart of the problem – your goal-setting framework. This is where OKR steps in.

Using Objective and Key Results (OKRs) is probably the easiest and most efficient way of setting company goals. Big companies like Google, Intel and Zynga have been using it for a long time. They all recommend this framework to any organisation that wishes to scale up fast and drive promising results in their undertakings.

Right below, you can get some overview of this framework plus objectives and key results examples to help you understand how to write it effectively.

What is Objective and Key Results (OKRs) ?

Objectives are statements of a company or individual’s goal for a specific period of time. They answer the question “Where do I want to go?”.

Before writing your objectives, take note of its following characteristics:

    It should be exact and specific.
    It should be easily understandable.
    It must be brief and straight to the point.
    It must be tangible.

Key Results bring your company closer to its stated objectives. They are your stepping stone. Completing each key result means being one step closer to your objectives. Below are the key qualities of the most efficient KRs:

    They are significant. They’re not just a to-do list. They are results of those small steps taken that make up an objective.
    KRs should be easily understood without the need to interpret.
    They are time-bound. There’s always a due date for every key result.
    KRs are scalable.

Ready “Why use OKRs” for more insights on why OKR benefits will improve your organisation.

OKR Best Practices

Writing down your OKRs for the first time can be challenging. You may have many doubts. Are you doing it right? Are you setting specific goals and key results? Are your OKRs ambitious yet achievable?

OKR at Google – ne of the best OKR practices by Google and many other organisations is writing down 3-5 objectives per level (e.g. per person, per team, or per department).

Going above this limit can be counterproductive as it could cause you or your team to be distracted with so many things to do. OKRs are a great tool for prioritisation.

Since you only get to work on a few objectives per quarter, say for instance, you will be able to allocate your time, efforts and resources properly.

Another best practice when writing OKRs is to use common language that your team understands. Contrary to your company mission and vision, OKRs are specific and measurable. While they are inspirational, they have to be clearly understood by anyone in your team.

If your OKR statements trigger confusion among your employees, you need to revise it.

Objective and Key Results Examples

Check out the following objective and key results examples as a guide to come up with your own:

Example #1

Objective: Lower Attrition Rate by 10%.

Key Results:

    Drive engagement among team members through an incentive program.
    Facilitate bi-weekly coaching sessions to low performers.
    Create an upskilling program for members who want to develop their skills.

Example #2

Objective: Make our customers happy.

Key Results:

    Conduct a monthly survey to get customers’ feedback.
    Perform a weekly calibration session for QA involving selected team members.
    Increase customer retention by 85-95%.
    Obtain an NPS score of 9.

Example #3

Objective: Establish a friendly, “family” like Company Culture.

Key Results:

    Achieve a 95% score in monthly employee PULSE survey.
    Expand employee recognition program.
    Launch a monthly Town Hall wherein employees can openly ask managers and leaders about anything and talk about their concerns.
    Celebrate small wins and progress each week.

Example #4

Objective: Raise revenues by 20%.

Key Results:

    Offer 40% discount for two consecutive weeks.
    Join at least 10 mall bazaars this month.
    Reduce distribution cost by 15%.
    Re-calculate product cost and markup.

Example #5

Objective: Improve the training process.

Key Results:

    Put up a dedicated L&D Team.
    Centralise training process for all departments and teams.
    Create a playbook for the new training process.
    Assign an L&D Representative for each department.

Example #6

Objective: Open 25 stores by December 2018

Key Results:

    Complete all necessary permits and documents for all 25 locations by February.
    Buy materials and start store renovation/construction by March.
    Promote stores opening via radio and television until launch.

Example #7

Objective: Hold company-wide retreat in September.

Key Results:

    Ensure funding will be properly allocated for the company-wide retreat
    Double production by 20% to reach quota that will cover the expenses for the retreat
    Hire and train sub-contractors to participate in the production while employees on the retreat

Example #8

Launch company cross-skilling to support seasonal roles.

Key Results:

    Identify a pilot group for the cross-skilling experiment.
    Create a cross-skilling playbook that can be used by any department or team.
    Identify key responsibilities of team leaders and POCs.
    Assess scores (QA and productivity) of the cross-skilling pilot group.

Example #9

Objective: Grow the company 4X bigger!

Key Results:

    Speed up hiring process without compromising quality.
    Hire 100 employees by end of the year.
    Hire a new Marketing VP by August.

Example #10

Objective: Improve our SEO

Key Results:

    Improve website design. Incorporate relevant tags and backlinks.
    Increase website loading speed by 95%.
    Invite guest bloggers and hire content writers to regularly update the site.
    Assign a dedicated online marketing team to monitor our SEO ranking.

Example #11

Objective: Increase Monthly Newsletter Engagement Rate by 50%.

Key Results:

    Revamp the layout of newsletter.
    Add more contents that customers will find useful, apart from the regular product updates and special offers.
    Feature one interesting article each time.

More Tips to Writing Good OKRs

    Get insights from your employees. Their feedback is valuable for you to come up with challenging OKRs that truly make an impact to your company. Hold a meeting that is dedicated for brainstorming OKRs per team.
    Pull up your historical data. When setting objectives, you want to look at your company’s historical data. It will guide you in coming up with realistic “stretch” goals and key results, especially when you’re looking to increase numbers such as profits, staffing, and the like.
    OKRs is a “bottom-up” process. Empowering employees to make their own OKRs is one of the best ways to drive engagement, get buy-in, and ensure that everyone is working together to achieve the overall goals of the company.
    Be clear about your KRs. Use common words that everyone will understand. If anything seems vague, edit or revise it.
    Setting goals is a key organisational process. With these objectives and key results examples, you should be able to draft your own in no time!

So are you ready to start working on your OKR? Not so fast! Check out our Organisational Mastery Quiz to uncover other chain balls that are holding your company back. Best five minutes you can spend on your company’s growth.

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

Take The Test

If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post Objective and Key Results Examples to Help Your Company Set Effective Goals appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

Why Use OKRs? Here’s why …

Why use OKRs?

There are many different ways to approach goal setting. However, very few are as effective and impactful than Objective and Key Results (OKRs).

There are two major reasons why OKR remains to be the most popular people management and goal setting framework up until today, despite being a relatively old concept.

First, OKRs are built on two incredibly powerful goal-setting principles: Management by Objectives (MBO) and S.M.A.R.T. Secondly, the OKR process – from goal setting to measuring and tracking are all focused on what matters most to your business: results.

OKRs are widely used in the corporate world these days. If you aren’t adopting this framework yet in your company, here are some reasons that make it more robust and viable than other goal-setting approaches:

OKRs ensure alignment of goals

As your company grows and the organisational structure becomes even more complex, the more challenging it is for leaders like you to ensure alignment.

With OKRs, keeping everyone aligned is not a problem. Another challenge that growing companies encounter is the high possibility of individual goals and priorities overlapping.

Everyone in your company can have their own set of priorities and sometimes, they don’t match that of their leads or managers, and the organisation. OKRs solve this problem through cascading alignment.

In what way?

An important process involved in OKRs is reviewing company goals prior to the beginning of each quarter. During this phase, executives gather to discuss the organisational objectives. In most instances, a maximum of 3-5 objectives are determined, which will then have to be cascaded to departments, teams, and individual employees.

The cascading process is very important because it ensures that everyone is on the right page. Each employee or team is going to work on their individual OKRs while bearing in mind the high-level OKRs set by the leaders and key stakeholders of the company.

Another beauty of OKRs is collaboration. One remarkable component of OKR is that it promotes collaboration company-wide, not just between managers and executives.

Everyone is involved – from the big bosses down to the bottom employees. Each one can access the OKRs of other staff and teams and are encouraged to offer help.

If your company culture is conservative, brace yourself. Major culture shift must be welcomed to adopt this framework.

Furthermore, OKRs encourage bottom-up communication. This is essential in creating buy-in and commitment from employees.

With this framework, employees had to create their own OKRs. They have the freedom to do so and can even include personal goals.

While their OKRs should be discussed with their superior or manager and approved by the same, this approach gives employees an opportunity to actively participate in the goal-setting process.

This greatly drives engagement, boosts their performance, and ultimately, bring positive results to the organisation.

OKRs make goals easier to achieve

In the complex nature of organisational structures, having another complex tool is the last thing that your company needs. OKRs, despite being so powerful, are but a simple concept that is easy to follow and implement.

The Key Results are what makes OKR so effective. The reason is that these OKRs break down the objectives into smaller steps.

KRs are brief statements that are clearly defined, specific, and measurable. Hence, they make it easier for employees and their leads to monitor progress.   

Qualities of Effective OKRs

For best results, Key Results must have the following characteristics.

KRs are specific. Organisations that have successfully used OKRs see to it that they use specific language that is common to all their employees when drafting their objectives.

For example, saying that you want to grow your business as your objective is not enough because it is ambiguous. You have to state your objectives in a precise language. A clearer objective could be “Increase my profits by 50%.”

A successful OKR does not stop there. You still have one question to answer – in what way will you be able to accomplish this goal?

That’s where KRs come in. OKRs should always be measured. For example, if your objective is to increase your profits by 50%, what will be the indicators that you have achieved this goal?

One indicator might be a reduction in your operational cost and distribution cost. Another would be doubling your production. Third indicator could be completing 10 more projects than what you usually do.

From these measures (also called ‘milestones’), you can break down your key results into more specific tasks and strategies.

When cascading OKRs to your team, make sure that your objectives are aligned to company-level goals and that your key results are measurable, specific, and time-bound. In some cases, there will be a need for you to re-adjust your OKRs to suit the company’s ever-changing needs.

OKRs should be relevant. When creating OKRs, you have to determine the most important thing for your company right now. This process is called ‘prioritisation’.

What are the most relevant matters to be handled right now? Are your objectives something that can be put in hold for a later time? Or are they too pressing and urgent to be taken into account as soon as possible.

OKRs are time-bound. Each key result should have a deadline. Whether it’s after a week, two weeks, six weeks, or three months, you have to set a deadline for all your key results.

Setting a timeline instils a sense of urgency and drives your team to focus. All these helps you achieve larger objectives.

In summary. . .

OKR, without a doubt, is among the most helpful frameworks that companies can use today in order to achieve their goals. This framework has two components: objectives and key results.

There are many reasons to use OKRs.

One is that it’s easy to implement. Regardless of the  industry you’re in, company size, and organisational structure, OKR is flexible and can be tweaked to work with different dynamics.

Second, OKRs can help foster collaboration and engagement among your emplhttps://luis-goncalves.com/okrs/oyees, and boost their performance. Because this process has a bottom-up alignment, you can get the buy-in from your employees and ensure their commitment throughout the process.

Third, OKRs make bigger goals easy to achieve by breaking them down into smaller, achievable objectives. Your key results make it possible. By setting specific, scalable and time-bound indicators, you can greatly achieve your goals.

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

Take The Test

If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post Why Use OKRs? Here’s why … appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

Which Companies Use OKR? Take A Look At These Successful Companies

Which companies use OKR? When it comes to OKRs, the name Google is almost inseparable. Well, that’s because they are one of the pioneering companies that adopted OKR.

OKR at Google. When John Doerr worked at Google, he brought the concept which originated from Intel to the company. Since then, OKR has become a major component of the company’s success.

From a team of 30 people to now a giant tech corporation with over 70,000 employees, Google is one of the hallmarks of OKR as an organisational goal-setting methodology.

But apart from Google, are there other companies that use it? Is OKR something that any type of business can use? Is it currently the best goal-setting approach?

Let’s take a look at which companies use OKR apart from Google and learn from their best practices.

Amazon

Who doesn’t know Amazon? Despite the surge of competitors like Buy (BBY) Family Dollar, and Walmart (WMT), it remains to be the biggest electronic commerce and cloud computing businesses in the world today. Used by millions of people worldwide, the company is clear on its goals: make selling and buying fast, cheap, and easy.

Amazon is among the huge companies that heavily rely on Objective and Key Results (OKRs) as their primary goal-setting approach. For a big company such as them, there’s always a chance of miscommunication, mismatched expectations, confusions, and employees being pulled in too many directions.

OKRs are a very systematic methodology that ensures everyone in the organisation is aligned. It gives people a clear direction of where the company is headed, and how their roles can contribute to its success.

Another beauty of OKRs, according to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is that they allow companies to separate things that remain constant (also called validated strategies) from the experiments.

Adobe

Adobe Systems Inc is an American multinational computer software company which is focused on creating multimedia and creativity software products that we use today, such as the Acrobat Reader, Portable Document Format (PDF), and the Creative Suite/Photoshop.

Part of Adobe’s success in people management is the adoption of OKRs and its principles, one of which is listening to employees for feedback. The company used to adopt the “rank and yank” system wherein managers had to identify their least productive team members through a yearly evaluation.

It’s a tedious task – lots of paperwork and dreaded discussions. Each year, the system was causing so much resentment and infighting that forced some employees to quit their job and join a competitor.

After crowdsourcing ideas from their employees, the “rank and yank” system was replaced by a system called “Check In”. Instead of delivering the bad news, managers happily inform their teams who their best employees are and give them rewards in the form of bonuses and incentives.

OKRs took a big part of this system because it helps managers easily measure performance. While it’s not meant to ‘grade’ employees, managers can easily access their employees’ OKRs and assess their progress from there.

LinkedIn

Perhaps the biggest social networking platform for businesses and professionals, LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented service with over 500 million members worldwide.

Ranked as the 34th most popular website by Alexa, LinkedIn is indeed one of the most successful companies in the industry.

According to Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, their company uses OKRs to create urgency. Through OKRs, an organisation can focus on what is more important at the current situation, or in most cases, in the present quarter.

These goals are something you want to accomplish over a specific period of time through a “stretch goal”. Weiner also uses OKRs to run efficient and effective meetings wherein they focus on the status of everyone’s objectives, particularly the “wins” that take the company closer towards their goals.

Microsoft

Founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Microsoft is a solid brand when it comes to anything computer programming-related.

Gates recommend OKRs for anyone who wants to become a better manager. He claims that it has a big influence on his own management style.

His organisation executes more efficiently and achieve better results through this goal-setting method. OKRs allow them to measure what matters and can get everyone working on the same page.

Twitter

Created in 2006, this social networking service has rapidly gained popularity in the world. Used by over 100 million users, Twitter is a highly active platform, with 340 million tweets posted a day.

It also became the largest source of breaking news, which was very evident during the 2016 US Elections wherein over 40 million election-related tweets were posted during that day.

For Twitter, OKRs aren’t just used to measure progress. More importantly, it is used as a communication vehicle that allows everyone to see and understand what everybody else is working on.

It is important for Twitter employees to look at their colleague’s OKRs and talk about them in order to promote collaboration.

Zynga

Zynga is an American social game development company founded in 2007. While too many companies focus on mobile gaming, Zynga operates on social media platforms like Facebook.

CEO Mark Pincus tweaked their OKR system in such way that they adopt a weekly approach to it.

He asks everyone to write down what their OKRs for the week are and check every Friday how they did against their objectives. Calling it individual “roadmaps”, Pincus said their OKRs are a great way to help people stay on track and keeps everybody focused.

Introducing OKRs to Your Team

OKR is not a complicated framework. In fact, it is one of the simplest tools that any company can adhere to.

This management concept embraces the concept of setting specific and clear goals that are measured through specific, time-bound key results.

These and many other companies have proven that OKRs can fuel growth, team performance, and success in many ways.

These include fostering collaboration through two-way communication, asking employees’ feedback, focusing on what matters (setting priorities right), measuring success through key results, and building a culture of accountability.

If this is something that you want for your company, take our Organisational Mastery Quiz to uncover the chain balls that hold your company from performing at its best. It’s free and won’t take you five minutes.

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If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post Which Companies Use OKR? Take A Look At These Successful Companies appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

OKR Cheat Sheet: Guidelines, Tools, and Vital Frameworks

OKR Cheat Sheet

One of the most widely acclaimed goal-setting methodologies used today is Objective and Key Results (OKR). You probably have heard of it many times, and already got a clear understanding of what it’s like and how it can benefit your company.

You’ve been really wanting to adopt this approach. However, you are somehow clueless where to start. How do you cascade the process to your teams? How do you ensure that each team creates a set of objectives and Key Results aligned with the mission and vision of your company? How often should you do OKRs? And more importantly, how are you going to measure your success?

Those are really tricky questions. Fortunately, in this OKR cheat sheet, you are about to begin your OKR journey fast and easy. We’ve condensed every article I’ve published in this blog that talks about implementing OKR into this article. Let’s dive in.

Setting Goals/Objectives

OKR was introduced by Andy Grove – one of the founders of Intel. A venture capitalist from the same company, John Doerr, later on introduced it to Google when he became part of it. Since then, this popular approach has been widely adopted not only by Google but also other tech giants, including Amazon, LinkedIn and Spotify.

But regardless of what industry your company is in, the rules that apply to other company’s OKRs are pretty much the same with what can apply to your company. Whether you’re in the retail sector, manufacturing, or tech – OKRs are a great way to ensure that you are setting challenging yet achievable goals that really make an impact.

When setting objectives, bear the following things in mind:

Your objectives must be qualitative.
Use common language and vocabulary. You want to get your people inspired and excited. Unlike your company mission and vision statements, your OKRs must never be ambiguous as it is designed to give a clear direction to your employees about what they need to accomplish.
You must only have 3-5 objectives. Remember that OKRs are renewed on a quarterly, yearly or monthly basis. You want to focus on the most important goals that are time-bound.

Tool to Use: EISENHOWER IDEA Criteria for Goal-Setting

To make writing down your objectives easy, follow the Eisenhower approach. According to this idea, OKRs should be:

INSPIRING – Bold, visionary and eloquent that motivates your people to move forward.

DIFFICULT – Goals must be stretched and far from the status quo. When reaching that goal feels uncomfortable, you are doing the right thing.

EXPLICIT – Objectives are clear, brief and easy to understand. Even outsiders should be able to comprehend the OKRs you’ve set for your organisation.

ACHIEVABLE – Even if it’s difficult, your objectives must be achievable or nearly accomplished.

Note: Do not set goals that simply reflect your expectations or simply reiterate the daily course of your business.

Writing Key Results

Your KRs should explain how you are going to reach your objectives. Keep in mind that only results matter for each milestone. Your KRs shouldn’t be too focused on a potential solution. Neither should it be a plain list of tasks.

Tool to use: S.M.A.R.T. Approach

You are probably very much familiar with this tool. It is also used in OKRs, particularly in setting key results:

SPECIFIC – there shouldn’t be a need for your employees to interpret your KRs. It should be self-explanatory.

MEASURABLE – KRs SHOULD be measurable. There must be a quantitative indicator of success. Ex: 0-1.00 as used in Google – check OKR at google article

REALISTIC – Even though it’s difficult, it can be done with the team’s continued efforts and resources.

TIME-RELATED – Each key result must have a specific due date.

Cascading OKR Cheat Sheet

Aligning everyone in your company with your organisational OKRs is probably the toughest part. But this is also the most necessary because it’s what drives your company and your people to success.

Two weeks before the quarter is finished, everyone should already know which OKRs they’ve hit. Only then can you proceed to write another set of OKRs for the next quarter.
The senior management team should take the lead. They must set their OKRs in the quickest way possible so that the teams under them will have time to react.
Each business unit in your company should also have their OKRs. Under them are service groups or work groups that should set their OKRs based on their respective business units.
Put everything in black and white. Have a playbook or something similar. On your first implementation of OKR, have this process cascaded to everyone in your company.

Evaluating & Tracking OKRs

OKRs must be reviewed on a regular basis, usually weekly or bi-weekly. It should also be accessible to anyone in your company. This promotes transparency and sense of accountability.

Use a single grading system. Google uses a 0.0–1.0 scale. You can use words like “Done” or “Not Done”, whatever you prefer. Some companies even use symbols like a “traffic light” or “smileys”.
Use a tool that addresses your need. You can go with free ones like Google Docs and Sheets or other paid tools. There are various OKR software systems available in the market today. It is ideal to make use of a single, well-rounded tool that can be utilised by all your employees. However, you can also combine separate tools to suit your needs.
Set time for an in-depth assessment of each key result to further improve productivity and collaboration.

Setting OKRs and implementing them should be easier for your company with the help of this OKR tools. It can be challenging to start a new process and introduce them to your team at first. But with proper preparation and planning, you definitely will go a long way.

Want to know more about how you can improve your company’s performance? Take our Organisational Mastery Quiz! Won’t take you 5mins!

ORGANISATIONAL MASTERY SCORECARD

We have developed a free assessment in the form of a Scorecard to help you establish which areas of business you need to focus on to achieve your particular Organisational Mastery.

Take The Test

If you liked this article, feel free to visit my company Products and Services pages. We provide Team Coaching, Agile Training and Agile Consulting, OKR Training and OKR Consulting, Innovation Training and Innovation Consulting.

With my team, I built 5 main products: High Performing Teams, Scrum Team Coach, Scrum Master Mentoring, Organisational Mastery and the External Business Accelerator.

The post OKR Cheat Sheet: Guidelines, Tools, and Vital Frameworks appeared first on Luís Gonçalves.

OKR History for the Leadership and Management Nerds

If you landed on this page, you have my respect for researching a topic that only gets researched by management nerds