How to Bridge Strategy and Execution with Agile OKRs

Agile and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) frameworks represent two fundamental pillars of modern business — day-to-day project management and strategic planning. Both of them are meant to help you run a team efficiently and make it stay focused and aligned.

This article will explain the best practices for combining OKRs with Agile and explore how these frameworks can help you achieve greater agility and productivity.

What is OKR in Agile?

Agile OKR combines Agile and OKR frameworks, leveraging their strengths to provide a unified project management system.

What are OKRs?

OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. They help companies set clear goals (Objectives) and measure progress (Key Results) towards achieving them. For example:

• [O] Improve the user experience on our app.
• [KR] Reduce app loading time by 50%.
• [KR] Increase app store rating to 4.5 stars.
• [KR] Decrease bug reports by 25%.

OKRs help your team members understand what goals they are working towards, how these goals will be achieved, and how much their contribution matters in the big picture. This leads to increased transparency, motivation, and productivity.

If you want a deeper dive into the OKRs, consider reading John Doerr’s OKRs Guide or watching our 16-minute OKRs in Business video on YouTube.

What is Agile?

Agile (with a lowercase “a”) became a corporate buzzword in the last few decades. Everyone and everything is “agile,” even if they are unsure what that means. But for this article, we are talking about Agile with an uppercase “A” — a style of project management that focuses on continuous improvement and collaboration.

Agile emerged as a revolutionary response to traditional, rigid methodologies. It emphasizes adaptability, customer-centricity, and iterative progress, contrasting with the waterfall model’s step-by-step approach.

Agile teams work on a product in small increments, allowing for frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans. Core values and principles of Agile emphasize individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working solutions over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan.

NOTE: If you need a more detailed guide to Agile, we highly recommend this portal by Atlassian.

Agile shares some of those principles with OKRs, making it the perfect framework to supplement OKR-based goal-setting.

What Are the Benefits of Agile OKRs?

By combining OKRs and Agile, you ensure your entire business is aligned and moving in the right direction. Your goals direct your everyday work, your everyday work supports your goals.

The benefits of OKRs in Agile are:

• Alignment. The project initiatives are aligned with organizational goals, allowing them to direct the project forward.
• Visibility. Objectives, desired outcomes, the tasks needed to achieve them, and the progress made are visible to every team member.
• Adaptability: Biweekly Sprint cadence ensures quick response to changes, while quarterly OKR cadence makes you regularly re-evaluate your priorities.
• Continuous Improvement: Emphasis on iterations and retrospectives promotes a culture of learning and constant enhancement.
• Collaboration: Transparency fosters a culture of teamwork and open dialogue, akin to a collaborative ethos that propels projects forward.
• Measurement: The links between Issues and Key Results allow you to track their impact on the strategic goal directly.

Overall, Agle OKRs offer a very efficient project management framework. It is not much more complicated than either OKRs or Agile in separation but provides many benefits that you would not otherwise be able to access.

How to Combine Agile and OKRs?

An Agile environment is a set of principles and doesn’t specify methodology, so there are three popular contending takes on Agile: Scrum, Kanban, and Lean. All of them are worthwhile and can be combined with OKRs, but Scrum works best alongside them, so we will focus on it.

The feature that elevates Scrum above its competitors is Sprints. Sprints are two-week periods during which the team works on achieving shared goals. At the end of the Sprint, the team has a retrospective meeting to reflect on successes and failures before setting up the next Sprint.

This offers two opportunities to connect Agile and OKRs:

1. You can combine Sprint retrospectives with OKR check-ins. This gives an opportunity to constantly remind people of the strategic goals and plan the execution around them. And you can validate the Sprint results using the changes in the OKRs.
2. You can set one of the Key Results to be a Sprint Goal. This way, all the work done during this period will be focused on achieving it. If the KR is too big to tackle in one Sprint, you can focus on a portion of it instead.

FUN FACT: With OKR Board for Jira, you can use JQL to quickly make Key Result a Sprint Goal and pull all relevant tasks into it.

What you end up with is a layered structure that guides you from strategy to execution: Objective ➡️ Key Results ➡️ Sprint Goals ➡️ Tasks and Issues.

If your project is complex, you can have Initiatives and Epics between Key Results and Sprint Goals.

As you can see, combining OKRs and Agile creates a single “Agile OKR” system. This system allows you to align your entire project, from its strategy to its day-to-day tasks, around the same values.

Do You Need to be Agile to Implement OKRs?

Agile and OKRs represent different sides of the project management toolkit. While they work best together, nothing prevents you from implementing just one. So, for example, if your company is not Agile by design, but you want to bring clarity to its strategy — you can use OKR methodology. Alternatively, if you don’t like the idea of OKRs but want more clarity in your day-to-day routine — Agile will be of great help.

Managing OKRs and Agile in the Same Tool

Now that we’ve established why you should implement OKRs in Agile, we must combine them into one tool. Since we are already Agile, this tool will most likely be Jira.

Though you can implement OKRs in Jira using the native functionality, the tracking capabilities would be pretty limited. The best way to add OKRs into Jira is OKR Board for Jira.

OKR Board for Jira is the Atlassian marketplace’s most popular OKR management software. It is used by 3K+ customers from 50 countries and over 10,000 monthly active users. It is also developed by Oboard.

Our software implements a strategic layer in Jira and allows you to connect Initiatives, Epics, and Issues directly to your OKRs. This way, not only are team members constantly aware of what they are working toward, but we also can automate OKR tracking in Jira by monitoring Issue completion status. It is a perfect implementation of OKR in Agile, but it is also much more than that:

• Effortless Setup. With included onboarding, you can set up your OKRs in just a few clicks. The included onboarding will guide you through the setup process and let you define your team members’ roles before inviting them to the app.
• Automated Progress Tracking. No more complicated spreadsheets or standalone software that doesn’t talk to your tools. Just link your Key Results to Jira Epics that are aimed to accomplish them and watch your progress tracked automatically.
• Custom Dashboard Views. Say goodbye to switching between multiple tabs and software. OKR Board consolidates all your performance metrics and OKRs on one dashboard. Alternatively, you can filter them out by creating a Custom Dashboard that contains only the OKRs you want to focus on right now. This makes it easier for you and your team to stay aligned and focused on what’s important.
• Did we mention that you can export those Dashboards as PDFs in a single click? Because you can.
• Customized OKRs. Every team is different, and OKR Board for Jira gets that. You can customize OKR levels, weights, and types. Whether looking at strategic company objectives or specific departmental goals, the tool adapts to your needs.
• Controlled Access. OKR Board for Jira provides features like public and private Workspaces with distinct user roles, allowing you to control who sees what. This is particularly beneficial for larger teams or projects where information sensitivity is a concern.
• Extended Functionality with Confluence. For those looking to elevate their OKR management further, the Confluence plugin can be integrated to serve as an OKR knowledge base. This helps to store and retrieve valuable insights gained during OKR cycles, contributing to institutional memory and continuous improvement.

There are more things that the OKR Board for Jira can bring to the table — like powerful OKR Roadmaps that reach across projects to synchronize and align the entire company. To learn more about them, schedule a demo with us or start a trial for free; no credit card is needed.

P.S. To see how OKRs can combine with other frameworks, check out our article on OKRs and KPIs.