OKR Planning and Reporting Cadence Guidelines

This is an actual example of a standard operating procedure I created to help align organizations around planning and reporting cadence for OKRs.

OKRs, Objectives and Key Results are a powerful framework companies can use to help ensure everyone is working and partnering on the right things to move the company forward.

While as powerful as they may be, if they are not done well, they are nothing more than words on paper and can create confusion, misalignment, and hurt the company's overall progress (thanks Parker for this great callout). A small part of doing them well is ensuring you have a clear planning and reporting cadence, which I will share an example of with you today.

This SOP is not meant to be used as an end all be all, but rather a guideline on what you could potentially do at your organization to help increase cross-functional alignment, visibility, and overall transparency into what everyone in the org is working on.

Example SOP

Purpose:?

This process is designed to help align the organization with the planning and reporting cadence for OKRs (objectives, key results).

Important definitions:?

OKRs is a planning framework that we use to ensure we are all working on the right things at the right time and moving the company forward.?

KPIs (key performance indicators) are measurements that help determine whether we are meetings our overall goals.

Annual OKRs

Company-level annual OKRs planning schedule:

• 8 weeks (or whatever makes the most sense for your org) before the end of the year, the executive team meets to review the current year's progress and determine where the company needs to be by the end of the following year. The actual conversations around the next year's goals (financial and such) should start at least 3 months before the end of the year (in general, the executive team knows where the revenue needs to be for the next 3-5 years, but this is the time to make adjustments based on the current performance and take a more realistic look at what is possible). This particular event (exec planning session) is meant to solidify and create actual OKRs to help us achieve where we need the company to be the following year.?
• 4 weeks before the end of the year, annual planning is wrapped up and ready for any board approvals and communications out to the greater team.?
• Annual OKRs should be reviewed quarterly to ensure we are still working on the right things and to adjust for any new information we’ve learned throughout the previous quarter.?

Department-level OKRs

• In general, departments set quarterly OKRs (this is especially true in smaller and scale startups) but may have OKRs that are the same and span over multiple quarters. The reason for this is that this allows for flexibility in planning, greater accountability, and improved cross-functional alignment.?

Quarterly OKRs

Company-level quarterly OKR planning schedule:?

5 weeks (or whatever cadence works best for your company) before the end of the quarter, the executive team meets to review the current annual OKRs and each department's quarterly OKRs. The meeting is held to discuss the following:

• KPI review. Review the state of the state!
• Are the current company-level OKRs still valid? Has anything changed? Any new information we’ve received that’s important to consider?
• Review department-level performance. Any wins? Misses? Learnings? Anything that’s a major blocker to our success??
• The information in this meeting is then used to help inform the creation of the next department-level quarterly OKRs.
• Department-level OKRs for the following quarter must be completed and communicated no later than two weeks before the end of the current quarter.?During this time, all cross-functional requirements must be vetted and communicated. If there are dependencies on other teams, these must be communicated and approved.
• Team-member activities for the following quarter (actions that each team member will do to contribute to the department level) must be completed no later than one week before the end of the current quarter.?The same review for dependencies must be communicated and approved.

Important Alert: I cannot express enough the importance of going through cross-functional dependencies before calling your OKRs complete and ready to go! Failing to do this could result in a misallocation of resources or organizational misalignment.

Reporting Cadence

Reporting your OKR progress is a crucial component of OKRs that is often missed. Here are some suggestions on the reporting cadence. Again, you should adjust this cadence to match what works best for your organization, but, more frequent check-ins will likely help you identify early if your OKRs are off track.

• Weekly: Update any OKR or activity you are responsible for weekly by the end of the day every Friday in the appropriate spreadsheet.
• Bi-weekly: team leads review progress on activities completed to drive the higher-level department goals with direct reports.
• Monthly: Execs review the progress of department-level OKRs that are mission-critical to success. This will be a quick snapshot of where we are, what we may miss, and what we need in a read-out to the team (less than 5 mins per team member).?
• Quarterly: each department lead holds a post-mortem review (with their teams) of what went well, what didn’t, and learnings, and shares a summary at the Exec level and with the company.?
• Quarterly: we do a company quarterly kick-off meeting. During this meeting, we cover high-level wins, misses, and learnings by dept (not team), then a quick snapshot of what we will deliver for the next quarter.