A KPI is a tool for tracking the performance of a key area of your company. A KPI always contains a metric to measure the performance of that key area. A key result is a tool that has a positive impact on the performance of a given metric. Therefore, a key result also always uses a metric.
Key results measure how far you are from achieving your goal. The key results should be numerical and updated every week. If your key outcome is binary, it can be a task or a plan and not a key outcome. Which brings us to the next point.
Good sets of key results are more than just metrics. Think of each key result as your own score. Like a series of relegations in a soccer match, if we continue to advance successfully on the pitch, in the end we will achieve our goal: to score a scoring goal. Every organization, every team and every project needs a clear definition of success.
We all need a definition of what it means to be successful. But success means different things to different people. If you were to ask your team what success means for your company, you would probably get a different answer for each member of the team. Free download: A Beginner's Guide to OKR When used correctly, OKR helps teams and organizations define shared success criteria.
They establish clear and measurable criteria for success. OKR not only ensures that the criteria exist, but that those criteria are shared, transparent and communicated to other teams, employees, and even external partners. Imagine a hamster in its cage, running endlessly on its wheel, but not really moving. Is this how you feel about your company or your team? A lot of work, a lot of effort, but will you never get anywhere? Who considers themselves successful in your company? Do those who work long hours, don't sleep, work on weekends, or those who get real results? Do you want a team of hamsters, with a lot of effort that doesn't get you anywhere, or people who produce results? Key activity-based results usually begin with verbs such as launch, create, develop, deliver, build, do, implement, define, publish, test, prepare and plan.
Where X is the baseline (where we started) and Y is the goal (what we want to achieve). Option 1 can be confusing, as it's difficult to know how ambitious the goal is. Are we talking about increasing the NPS from 5 to 6 or from 40 to 48? A key result based on value need not be a measure of the company's ultimate objective (that is,. Revenues, profits or EBITDA), but it can be a component of a metric that has a correlation with value generation.
Below is a list of examples of key results based on activities and equivalent key results based on values. We want a culture focused on results and not on tasks. If you did all your homework and nothing improved, that's not success. If you complete all the tasks and nothing ever gets better, that's not success.
So, despite the “project management triangle”, the fact is that delivering a project on time, within scope and on budget isn't enough. The project must be successfully delivered, which means that the objectives that motivated it in the first place must be achieved. Your action plan is just a series of hypotheses. When setting OKRs, focus on the destination, not on the means to get there.
It is important to understand that we still need to monitor the implementation of initiatives. Without them, we won't reach our OKRs. However, initiatives are just bets and have to change if the numbers don't improve. Delivering an initiative is not enough.
Nobody works on initiatives as a hobby. Behind every initiative is a desire to improve one or more metrics. Therefore, instead of tracking the delivery of a project, we should measure the indicators that motivated it in the first place. When teams start with value-based OKRs, it's common for them to get stuck on including activities as key outcomes.
To convert those activities into value, think about what the consequences of succeeding at this task would be. What would be the expected results? Migrate the platform correctly. Many people have heard of Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes an objective, it ceases to be a good measure. On a surface level, there's nothing inherently wrong with measuring metrics.
It's data, and generally more data is a good thing. Data can provide you with information about your equipment, product and performance. Performance is an area that employers and clients like to focus on to “show that a team is producing,” but this can lead to some unwanted results. Instead, let's explore OKRs as a way to align leadership objectives with the perceived value of the team.
Over the years, I have encountered several OKRs (“purists”) who insist that there is no room in the model for the most important key results. According to these experts, you should focus exclusively on the key results of metrics that indicate business value or impact. If less, you run the risk, in your opinion, of turning OKRs into a glorified to-do list. The following describes several reasons why, when necessary, you should include the key results of the milestones as part of an OKR.
Don't hesitate to take the time to dig deeper and find the key results that will really matter on the path to your goal. While plans and projects are important to support your objectives, the key results are measurable business results and should be treated as such. It's clear that completing these key results required a bit of business intelligence and the cooperation of several teams. They are often necessary because they have never before measured the final impact on the business, the key results that they would like to track.
The same is true if you feel like you can complete all your key results and still not achieve your goal. Key results are always something that can be quantified, scored, timed and described how the objective will be achieved. Therefore, we can define a key result as a quantitative statement that demonstrates the achievement of a given objective. This key result cannot be measured numerically and it is not objectively clear how it contributes to the objective.
We established some key results to increase participation and improve data analysis within these modules for the team to work on. Key activity-based results usually begin with verbs such as launch, create, develop, deliver, build, do, implement, define, publish, test, prepare and plan. There are actions you can take to boost that increase in incoming leads, and these are often reflected in the key results of milestones. .
