Three key must-do's for your OKR governance system

In part 2 of our series on OKRs, we discuss how a best-in-class OKR governance structure can keep your system on track and delivering over time.?

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OKR systems are only as effective as the governance structure that supports them. It’s quite common for companies to spend a significant amount of time picking their top objectives and key results but then rarely or never meet to see how they are progressing against these goals. Unsurprisingly, this does not work well.

To get the most out of an OKR system, your company needs to effectively measure, track, review, and communicate your performance on your top results - and what’s going well and what’s not. A best-practice governance system that includes clear owners, scheduled governance meetings, and standardized dashboards, can go a long way in making this happen.

Clear ownership

As a first step, a clear owner needs to be assigned the responsibility for running and managing the ongoing governance process, including facilitating key meetings, compiling and distributing key materials, etc. Key responsibilities often include:

• Owning meeting invitations
• Managing and compiling the materials for each meeting?
• Supporting owners in preparing for the meetings as appropriate?

In addition to an overall process owner, each objective or key result will have a direct owner responsible for that OKR. That owner will work directly with the process owner to ensure preparation and ongoing reporting is consistent across the OKR system (e.g., updating key dashboards with updated numbers).?

In our experience, having a single process owner - who thinks holistically about the overall process and system - goes a long way in helping governance systems work well and consistently over time. In addition, this process owner can help OKR owners refine their thinking and plan, share key learnings across teams, better communicate findings with critical stakeholders, etc.?

Meeting cadence and design

A key responsibility of the governance process owner is managing a critical question: when and how will we meet to report our progress??

The first part of developing a meeting cadence is "who" needs to be at the meetings. Typically, OKR reviews include the working teams, who can explain their work and progress, and leadership teams, who review performance, help address roadblocks, and keep strategic alignment.?

Second, it helps to schedule regular meetings to create a consistent cadence, especially since meetings typically include many cross-functional attendees. Though a simple action, establishing regular meetings often goes undone, watering down follow-through and increasing the administrative burden to make this work over the long-term.

However, just setting up a meeting is not enough. You want your meetings to serve as an effective means of tracking and reporting on progress. To enable effective meetings, at a minimum, we suggest developing a clear and appropriate list of attendees, a consistent and reasonable meeting cadence, and a regular agenda.

To get this set-up, the OKR process owner should draft and finalize a governance structure with the executive team and communicate that final version out to the broader team.?

Key Dashboards

As OKR owners begin to work on delivering their key results, there’s a natural inclination to develop customized dashboards and materials to communicate progress on their specific objective and key result. While well intentioned, this approach adds a significant amount of complexity to the overall OKR system and can make it harder to update key leaders and stakeholders on progress across objectives.??

In our experience, companies are best served by creating and using standardized dashboards across objectives and key results (to the degree possible) so that company leaders and stakeholders can easily understand and track progress across OKRs. A consistent dashboard design makes it a lot easier to understand and process information versus OKR-specific dashboards that vary substantially from others.?

We recommend dashboards that include both key quantitative and qualitative insights and data points. Dashboard design and style can vary, but it should include tracing of the key result over time and the key actions or milestones that can drive meaningful progress in the short term. These dashboards can then be reviewed and discussed during the regular governance meetings.?

Closing?

Many companies make the mistake of overlooking how critical an ongoing governance system is for tracking and driving progress over time. In our experience, without a relatively good governance system in place, OKR systems rarely create value for companies, with the significant time and energy invested in upfront thinking often wasted given the lack of long-term follow through. Three key elements - clear ownership, governance meetings, and standard dashboards - can go a long way in driving ongoing engagement and ensuring your company gets the desired value of its OKR system.

In part 3, we will discuss three secrets we’ve learned executives should follow to make their OKR system work as well as possible. If you missed part 1 on how to lay a strong foundation for your OKR system, you can find that here.?

Have additional questions or want to connect? Email John at [email protected].