OKR Case Study #1 — How to set KEY results?

If you’re new to the OKR methodology and wonder how it can help your organization, click here to learn the basics.

In the Ekohe OKR series, we’ll walk through samples of a few OKRs and explain how you can achieve the best results by defining great OKRs.

Let’s first determine how to find the KEY results for an objective.

For every objective, we can set different results. Some of them can help us focus on the objective and achieve what we really seek to achieve. These are the KEY results we want to capture and use.

Often, employees or stakeholders will define results that are not actually the key result. They may not relate to the objective at hand, or may misguide people. Finding the true key result(s) is one of the most important notions when setting your OKRs. To check if our key results are really the KEY results, we can:

1. Think about the worst actions we could take to achieve each key result. We want each result to be a guidance for our actions, but it should never be too restrictive nor lead to bad behaviors.
2. Then ask yourself these two questions:

• If we’ve already attained the key results listed here, has this objective been achieved?
• If a key result is not achieved (or an opposite outcome occurs), can we still fulfill the same objective?

Let’s look at an example:

Objective: Improve efficiency and organization in Agile methodology projects

• KR 1: Reduce sprint meetings by 15 minutes
• KR 2: Close at least 80% of issues for each sprint

The worst actions for these two results are simple:

• KR 1: Stop every sprint call when we hit the time limit (say, 45 minutes).

Why: This is the worst action because we’d still want to continue (or improve) our communication within the team. Arbitrarily stopping every meeting at a certain time even if the meeting objective is not achieved goes against goal of effective communication.

• KR 2: Close issues at the end of sprint and create new ones if some of them are not finished/shipped.

Why: This is the worst action because recreating unfinished issues is basically the same as moving the old issues to the next sprint. This creates too much work overhead.

I’m not saying that we are definitely going to take the worse actions for the sake of achieving these key results. But considering the worst case scenarios can help us dig deeper to find the key results we really want.

Now let’s test these key results with the two questions above:

• If we’ve already reduced sprint calls by 15 minutes, are efficiency and organization improved?

Maybe not, especially if we rushed through meetings and communication remains unclear. On the other hand, if we extend the sprint calls to a half day, but communication is extremely effective and everybody knows what each will do in the following week, efficiency is still achieved despite the longer meetings (personally, as a developer, I would love to attend this half-day long sprint call).

So maybe the time of sprint calls is not the KEY result here, but the efficiency of internal communication. The result of this efficiency may actually appear in the speed of feature shipments, for example.

• If we’ve closed 80% issues for each sprint, are efficiency and organization improved?

Again, maybe not, especially if they are just closed when the sprint ends, or if we are just shipping 8 out of 10 tiny issues/features. If certain issues are not closed at all, but features are shipped better with fewer bugs, I’d say efficiency in this situation improved, too.

So maybe issue close rate is not the actual KEY result here; instead, it’s the quality of the feature shipped.

In our experiences with OKR, we’ve found that a little bit of up-front thought towards Key Results helps with both daily and long-term performance. We suggest to always review your OKR’s after you’ve defined them and to dig a little deeper to find the real key results.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of our OKR series where I’ll walk you through another case study to answer why OKR is not about “YOU.”

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