You may have heard of both OKRs and Agile Working before. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and it’s how companies set outcome based goals in an aligned, top-down and bottom-up way. The idea being a simple one, the company sets high level goals and teams then propose goals that will help them achieve those in an OKR format. 

For example, if a company has an OKR that included revenue growth, a marketing OKR that supports that might be:

Objective: Grow Organic to help sales hit their quotas

Key Result: Increase Organic Visitors from X to Y

Key Result: Generate X sign-ups from the organic channel

What you have there is a desirable future outcome that is described in an OKR format.

The other attributes the OKR framework recommends is:

1. Frequently discussed – OKRs should be check-in and discussed at a regular and frequent cadence – often weekly
   
2. Ambitious – OKRs are not always calibrated to be achieved 100% – they are set to be hard where 60 – 70% might be a good outcome
   
3. Transparent – OKRs are not intended to be hidden away, they are meant to be shared, discussed and visible to a wide audience 

Agile Execution

If OKRs describe a future end-state in a measurable way, what gets you there are to-dos, cards or initiatives. These collectively are the activities that drive achievement. 

Agile ways of working like Kanban and Scrum allow teams to plan work in short execution cycles and work in an effective way towards those goals.

Seeing both together brings meaning to work and helps employee engagement as well as productivity. There are also huge benefits to bringing work and priorities out in the open and away from discreet personal to-do lists. Delegated and assigned work goes through a filter of the work currently being done, and can either be put on the backlog or on the active list.

Both OKRs and agile are therefore ways of both prioritising what matters and allowing teams to execute. Which then brings up another interesting area – empowerment and trust. Both OKRs and Agile are designed to allow teams to work with a high level of autonomy towards goals. Which when work and results / outcomes are visible is much less of an issue than you would think, even for the most controlling of management.

Cadence

With OKRs and Agile you are committing to both a set of planning, execution and conversational cadences that are short deliberately. OKRs are mostly planned in Quarters with monthly reviews. OKR and executional check-in that also cover priorities and problems being faced in the week ahead are weekly. There may also be very short daily-stand-ups.

At the heart of all of these conversations is the idea of being open, transparent and speaking freely and being heard. Conversations are our human superpower and both of these frameworks rely on us using that superpower well and frequently.

Learning

The other major part of both OKRs and Agile is the encouragement to continually learn and share those learning. These are often called retrospectives. Even if things don’t go well, there is a learning experience in there to share.

Ready?

Setting goals and executing in an agile way is not a luxury, it is ‘table-stakes’ for fast moving and competitive markets. If you’re using budgets, long waterfall projects, team goals in documents and have metrics hidden away in fragmented software, re-thinking goal and executional alignment might be something to make a priority.