Objectives and Key Results, simply known as OKRs, is a management method that makes goal-setting a meaningful and measurable framework. OKRs is a technique that is used by individuals and organizations to define goals with quantifiable milestones. It channels the progress towards the goal and ensures its achievement through a series of break points that can be assessed through numerical measurements.
Learn how to create objectives and key results
Objectives
An objective can be defined as a goal that needs to be achieved. Setting the objectives for your organization, team, or department allows you to tackle significant problem areas, set stable targets, and align your team on a unified mission.
Key Results
Key Results help you define break points that set your team on the path to achieve the objective. They are best defined with a measurable system that allocates values to them. These values enable you to calculate how close you are to completing the objective. Once all the listed key results are done, the objective can also be completed.
Benefits
- Set prioritized goals with well-defined outcomes.
- Align your organization's efforts towards specific and well-crafted objectives.
- Accomplish goals within the set timeframe
- Use periodic milestones to monitor progress towards objectives.
- Get measurable data to analyze and quantify your progress.
OKRs in Zoho Sprints
Zoho Sprints is an agile project management tool that equips you to effectively plan, manage, and complete your organization's goals. OKRs in Zoho Sprints enables you to set organizational objectives, department-specific objectives, and team-related objectives that can house key results to track and monitor the progress towards those objectives.
The OKR board displays the created OKRs along with details of the progress, status, start and end dates, owner, assignees, etc.
Duration filters
You can view the objectives using a duration filter that selectively lists objectives and their key results based on the selected duration. You can also create custom duration filters to set a specific date range to view the OKRs.
Dashboard
Dashboard in OKRs are similar to those available in other modules. The dashboard provides you with a graphical representation of progress based on the status of OKRs, the completion percentage, and user activity.
Work Items
You can add new items or associate existing items to the OKRs. This will allow you to manage the objectives and the key results as work items
Example
Let's assume you are a learning platform that focuses on design-related online courses targeted at Novices, Practitioners, and Experts. Although you have a reasonable number of subscribers who fall under the novice and practitioner categories, very few from the expert category subscribe. So, your organization is trying to boost the traffic of "experts" to your platform, and you need to state your objectives that will help you attain this goal.
Each of the objectives needs to be measured for progress. In order to measure progress and ensure that the expected outcomes are delivered, you need to jot down the key results. The following will be the objectives and key results:
- Create courses focusing on recent technologies and AI (Objective)
- Research and find the latest software for design
- Analyze the complexity of those software and identify those that suit our expert audience
- Train our tutors on those software
- Curate sophisticated courses that will appeal to experts (Objective)
- Research competitors on what kind of courses they offer for experts and which of those have takers
- Finalize the list of courses that will best suit our audience
- Create outlines for each of the courses
- Create in-depth course scripts
- Record and design course videos
- Publish courses on platform
- Adopt a promotional strategy that attracts the experts (Objective)
- Create promotional banners targeting experts
- Come up with a pricing and discount strategy
- Partner with designing firms to promote the courses
- Create an email campaign for the specific category
- Build a community for experts to facilitate conversation (Objective)
- Create an online community of design experts
- Post content on a weekly basis on social media to build conversation
- Conduct offline, in-house sessions
Creating OKRs in this meticulous manner will allow your organization to avoid gaps, have a well-defined path to navigate, and periodically assess and confirm that the intended outcome is achieved. You can create work items specific to the listed OKRs and manage them as linked entities withing the OKRs themselves.