A hyper-growth European tech company rebooted its OKRs and rated the process 4.6 out of 5.
After two quarters of OKRs with limited impact, a hyper-growth European tech company selected ZOKRI through a market-wide RFP to reboot the system around strategy; the reworked approach scored 4.6 out of 5 in an internal value survey and led to a nine-month retained engagement.
Context
The company had used OKRs for two quarters with limited progress. The underlying behaviours that had motivated adopting OKRs in the first place were still present, so the leadership went to market to reboot the system properly.
What we did
Selected through a market-wide RFP, we coached the leadership team and facilitated workshops in Paris, re-booting OKRs with high-level strategic OKRs anchored in the strategy and measurements connected to a strategic data model. OKRs were agreed, OKR teams were created, trained, coached and supported to make significant progress, with retrospectives to follow.
We were then retained for a further nine months to train internal champions, coach OKR leads, facilitate more leadership workshops, build data models and KPI trees, and create internal training assets: templates, guides and handbooks.
Why it worked
Anchoring OKRs in the strategy and a real data model gave the teams something worth committing to, and the coaching made the new behaviours stick where two earlier quarters had not.
Sector-anonymised at the client's request. Figures are the client's own; no numbers have been added. Written by Matt Roberts.
Matt leads enterprise OKR implementations at ZOKRI with Peter Kerr. Across the team that's 100+ implementations in 15+ enterprise organisations, from banks to car makers, in several countries and rather more time zones. Before ZOKRI he co-founded Linkdex, an enterprise SaaS platform, and sold it. He writes the method behind these notes, most of it learned the hard way in other people's leadership meetings.
Two quarters of OKRs with little to show for it usually means the system was never anchored in strategy. We reboot it around your strategy and coach it until it sticks.