A Typical OKR Cycle - Everything From Draft To Completed

A Typical OKR Cycle - From Draft To Completed

The key to creating high impact OKRs that will move-the-needle and are not just wishful thinking, which means you have the time and resources to execute them, is having a strategic planning process that ensures OKRs are socialized and considered properly.

Written by Matt Roberts | Co-Founder of ZOKRI

Good questions to ask as part of this process are:

Why is it important that we make progress towards this OKR now?
How much time and resource is needed to make good progress?
Who needs to be working on this OKR?
Do you have the skills, experience and knowledge in the team to achieve the OKR?
Does the OKR align with Strategic or Team OKRs?
Who needs to sign-off the OKR?
Who needs to be made aware of the OKR?

ZOKRI allows you to design processes like this as part of the OKR cycle.

How To Launch OKR

It’s a common practice to launch Company OKRs in a town hall every quarter, with department and cross-functional OKR leads sharing their specific OKRs. Our OKR consultants would usually recommend this approach to foster transparency and alignment across teams. Without this level of openness, the risk of OKR failure increases significantly before you’ve even begun.

Updating & Discussing OKRs

Weekly Check-Ins

If you own OKRs or aligned Activities you will be reminded via ZOKRI to update the following information at the cadence you choose, which for most is weekly. It’s great to have this embedded in your OKR culture.

Progress - what’s the latest progress, often a metric as you’ve seen. If the metrics come from an integrated tool or spreadsheet, this will be automatically updated.
Confidence or Risk - how confident are you about hitting the target? Is this at risk?
Comments - what information can you share for context?

In ZOKRI these updates take minutes and will automatically get shared with team members and interested colleagues.

Where something has been holding someone back, you should mark the issue as resolved.

KPIs often have a different check-in schedule as the metrics might be on a monthly update schedule.

Weekly Team Meetings

Once a week for 15 to 30 minutes get teams together to discuss their OKR(s), and more specifically the activities currently being worked on and those that are going to shortly get worked on. A good agenda format is:

You can either have ZOKRI on screen or meetings can also be scheduled via ZOKRI with the Meetings Module. This module prepares slides and allows you to assign actions as take notes during the meeting for easy action tracking and contact report and contact report distribution.

Monthly Reporting

At the month it is common to ask OKR owners to submit a short update on how the OKR is progressing. Highlighting any issues that are slowing progress, as well as noteworthy achievements or breakthrough moments. If you’re using ZOKRI the platform will remind you to submit this report.

Completing OKR & Retrospectives

You can complete an OKR during or at the end of the quarter or year. You can also carry on an OKR (with or without amendments to Key Results and targets) into the next quarter or year if it’s still the most important objective to make progress on at that moment in time.

When you complete an OKR you should complete what is called a Retrospective. You do this in ZOKRI on the OKR details page itself.

Here you will be asked to complete four things:

To share your reflections of how you worked towards the objective. For example:

Was this the right OKR to be working towards?
Did you get the time you wanted or needed?
Did you keep to the check-in, meeting and reporting cycle?
Were the people or resources that you needed available to you?
What was the mood and energy levels amongst the team?
Did business-as-usual work or firefighting take time away from the Objective?

What did you learn, and more specifically what should you:

How successful was the OKR?

When you create an OKR, you are trying to describe what success looks like using Key Result measures and targets.

As you will have read, with OKR we often set stretch targets. For this reason 100% + progress towards all stretch goals would not be a reasonable expectation, so often less than 100% can also be a success.

There are other ways of succeeding as well. Perhaps we’ve learned, discovered or even invented something valuable that won’t have shown up in the final % progress number.

This is why at the end of a quarter, for each OKR we sit and discuss the OKR and capture what we did and learned, label the success using the following OKR grading:

It’s a much fairer and balanced way to define what goal success looks like.

Should this OKR now be considered as complete or continued in the next quarter?

Retrospectives can be managed in ZOKRI with seamless transitions of OKRs between quarters happening if OKRs need to be continued. OKRs can also be used during the appraisal process or performance management.

How To Launch OKR

Updating & Discussing OKRs

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