OKRs typically contain three to five high-level objectives, with another three to five measurable key outcomes for each objective. Even in larger organizations, having more than five OKRs at a time is never recommended. OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is an objective system used by Google and others. It's a simple tool for creating alignment and commitment around measurable objectives.
The OKR methodology is a powerful tool that helps us structure our goals. When setting OKRs, each key outcome must be measurable and have an objective. Measuring the results is what really matters and what will guide us to victory. However, it's still common to see people struggling to understand what good key outcomes are and why it's important to measure results.
OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results, a collaborative objective-setting methodology that uses teams and individuals to set ambitious and challenging goals with measurable results. For this OKR to better measure what matters, key results must be converted into measures that are direct evidence of the objective. This type of measure usually starts well as creators monitor the results and reinforce the desired results. It's more useful to assume that OKRs were conceived as result-oriented objectives, and that key results are quantitative measures of performance.
Each set of OKRs must incorporate the organization's comments and be subject to multiple checks and drafts. Most of the practical information for drafting an OKR does not address any of the common problems and errors typical of articulating measurable objectives and quantitative measures. If your key results can't be measured exactly with numbers, but your objectives are more focused on dates, such as “printing the new issue of the magazine before the *date*” or “hiring a new IT analyst before the *date*”, the KRS score will most likely reach the 1.0 mark quite often. Most of the benefits offered by the OKR methodology, such as better alignment across the organization and transparency, require that the OKRs themselves be clear and understandable.
You'll need to decide how the OKRs fit into your strategic plan and how they align with strategic initiatives and actions. The OKR framework has proven to offer great benefits and results to thousands of companies around the world. Read popular literature on OKRs and you'll get very varied definitions of what they mean and how to write them. In reality, the vast majority of the key results I've read, in hundreds of OKRs from various sources, describe how to achieve the goal, rather than how to know if the goal has been achieved.
