Our OKRs journey, lessons learnt...

As we are back into 2022 full flow, I wanted to share some of the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) learnings from the previous quarter.

Amplience commenced their OKRs journey in mid-2021, by discussing, agreeing, and communicating the Company level OKRs to the whole organization.

To manage the gradual rollout of this new process, six teams were selected. Setting sessions were facilitated and Company aligning OKRs created. OKRs are managed in a dedicated tool that supports; capturing, check-ins, reporting, tracking and, if required, the management of the initiatives and actions that will “potentially” deliver the key results. I say “potentially” since these are only hypotheses until implemented and measured.

At the end of the quarter, it is important to properly stop and close off the OKRs, do not just keep going since you did not get 100%. As part of this closure session, the whole team should reflect on:

• Have we made the impact we wanted?
• Did we meet the key results? Did we stretch ourselves? Were they measurable? And importantly were they achievable? ?
• Were the initiatives and actions taken aiding success?
• We want to ensure we improve the OKRs process, what should we do differently?

This reflection took the form of a simple retrospective.

What to continue!

The parts of the process that were beneficial and should be maintained.

• Executive Sponsorship: Having senior sponsorship showed how important the OKRs framework and benefits are to the whole Company
• Prioritisation: What is important and what is not – allows proper discussions on the initiatives and actions that are aligned to delivering the Objectives and growth
• Focus, Focus, Focus: Ensures we are on top of the important things
• Transparency: Visibility of what is of key importance across the multiple teams
• Tracking: Seeing progress on a weekly basis and making small changes to successfully aid delivery
• Healthy Regular Discussions: Good opportunity to slow down and converse as a team on shared goals and challenges
• Collaboration and Alignment: Common understanding, got us thinking about what we can do better as a team to change and be more efficient and effective
• Empowerment: Great to have the team input into what is important to meet the Company Objectives, ensures all team members involved
• Quantitative: Becoming a data driven and measurable organisation ?
• Tools: Made good use of the supporting tools, important to have invested in software specific to OKRs
• Keep it Tight: Keep the number of OKRs per team to a maximum of 2 Objectives (3 at a push) with a maximum of 4 Key Results (5 at a push), this keeps it simple and focused, anymore and you are in danger of spending more time on managing the process than doing the work

What to improve!

The recommendations for continuous improvement.

• Dependencies: Feeling that some OKRs were beyond the deparmental team's control and required support from other areas – we recommended creating cross functional teams with dedicated OKRs
• Quantitative: Be “even” more data driven and gain a better understanding of the causes of peaks and troughs ?
• Action Management: Establish a plan as to “how” we are going to achieve the OKRs, ensure that the initiatives are planned, owned, and tracked – make this tracking part of the OKR check-ins
• Influenceable: Some key results could not be influenced in the short term – break the Key Results down to be achievable within the quarter
• Hard to Measure: Some Key Results are difficult or cannot be measured on an ongoing basis, for example quarterly surveys – make these KPIs and look for shorter cycle measures
• Clarity: Ensure the OKRs are clearly written and unambiguous, it should be easy for someone outside of the owning team to understand them
• Overly Ambitious: Since they had not been measured before, some Key Results ended up being too lofty, recommended taking the closing values into account when setting the next quarters (there is nothing wrong with be Key Results being stretching but they must be achievable)
• Company OKRs: We are constantly growing so ensure the Company OKRs are explained during employee on-boarding, are clearly visible and referenced – show the top-down and bottom-up alignment and perform shared Company OKR check-ins to show progress
• Check-ins and Confidence Meetings: Teams are busy and it is often difficult to get people together – this should not be an additional overhead and should be covered through the normal team cadence, this is about prioritising for the coming week
• Celebrate: Ensure key achievements are celebrated and shared

It is great to see these learning become part of the present quarters OKRs.

As we expand the pilot to more teams, we must address scaling. How to safely manage the next phase of the OKRs rollout is a key focus of the Programme Office OKRs. ?This will be the subject of a future journey blog. ?

If you wish to discuss OKRs then feel free to connect and message me.

Opportunity for personal growth, if you want to join our progressive teams, Amplience’s open roles are available via: https://careers.amplience.com/

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