Worry-free project management using OKRs
Whether you’re in a startup or a large company, this simple tool will bring your projects clarity
Where do you want to get? What do you want to achieve? Whether in the personal or professional world, this a question to which we usually have an answer: get in shape, read more, become an industry leader, increase the team’s efficiency, or whatever.
Why, then, is it so common to be at a loss on how to get there? Why the uncertainty about what’s the best course of action, day to day? And why is it so common to miss those goals?
One of the questions I get most often from the startups I coach is how they should go about managing their work to ensure getting where they want to get. Usually, companies resort to one of two options:
Make a detailed Gantt chart of all tasks they need to do in the next year — or more!
Not do any sort of plan and just sort of do what seems the most important right now
Often, they start by doing 1, and then revert to 2.
Both of these are bad ideas. In this post, I’ll explain why, and then introduce OKRs, the system you should be using instead.
Why a Gantt chart is a bad idea
Gantt charts are seducing. You list out everything you need to do, in the order it needs to be done, and then you can plan and make sure you can reach your objectives. And you can also do advanced analysis: identify what your critical path is, which kind of resources you need, and so on and so forth. That’s great, right?
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say that Gantt charts are always useless nor do I intend to pick a fight with Henry Gantt and his awesome moustache. But I do mean that Gantt charts are useless for startups.
Gantt charts are useful, they are indeed a key tool, but only for complex and predictable projects.
Gantt charts work if your project is (1) complex and (2) predictable
What fits this description? Many industry projects do, and in particular most building projects. Building a dam, for instance, will involve the work of thousands of specialists over a period of years. But from the start, you know what will need to be done, in what sequence. Sure there may be surprises along the way: geological discoveries, accidents, and so on. These may set your plan back, but it will still be valid. There isn’t a discovery you can do mid-way through that would have you build your dam in wood instead of concrete or have you make it thicker or thinner: the plan is set and will not change.
A new venture, on the other hand, is both complex and not predictable, and for a very simple reason: if it were predictable, it would not be new.
The worst case scenario if you make a detailed plan for your venture is falling in love with the plan and sticking to it even when you have discovered why it was wrong. Your work then becomes a death march, and will be as pleasing as that name suggest.
The best case scenario is figuring out that your carefully laid out plan does not make any sense, and giving it up. But that often leads founders to mistakenly conclude that they shouldn’t plan at all.
Why no plan is a bad idea
This part should be obvious, but after seeing so much scorn of planning in the start-up community I feel compelled to spell it out.
First of all, having no plan will make collaboration difficult or impossible. There will be tasks done by several people at the same time, people waiting for work that won’t come any time soon, and so on and so forth.
Second, and most importantly, having no plan will make it impossible to prioritize tasks. At any point in any growing company, a hundred things will need to be done and you will only have resources to do a couple. Without a plan, there is no way of picking out the correct ones. This leads to focusing on the most cognitively available item on your to do list: something a client mentioned recently, the feature in which a bug was found, that new industry Forbes just said was cool, etc. That all falls broadly under the problem of false precision about which I wrote in the past.
Introducing OKRs
At its core, whatever planning method you use should be able to do three things:
Capture where you want to go
Allow you to know whether you’re on track to get there
Help you know what you should be doing, right now, to move towards that goal
There is a tool tailor made to give guidance in environments of extreme complexity and uncertainty: OKR. Developed by Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s and popularized by their adoption by Google, OKR is a method that relies on Objectives and Key results. Objectives are what you want to achieve: they should be qualitative, inspiring goals. Key results should be measurable indicators of whether you are getting there.
Let’s take an example. And let’s not talk about start-ups for a moment, but take a new year’s resolution. Maybe you’ve decided that this year, you should get in shape, have a better budget, or read more books. If you’re like 88% of people, you’ll end the year not reaching that goal. Why? While the goal you’ve set yourself is certainly valid and should be inspirational, there is no way to know, along the year, either what to do or whether you’re on track to get there. Let’s say your goal was to get in shape. We’re in late January and you still haven’t hit the gym. Well, that’s not a big deal! There’s still 11 months to go, plenty of time for you to change your ways and get where you want to go.
See the problem?
That goal you set yourself would be a great Objective in the OKR framework. However, it is less than useful if it is not associated with tangible, measurable key results.
In the case of getting in shape, there’s a number of measurable key results you should decide to track. For instance:
Go to the gym twice per week
Walk 10'000 steps per day
Eat home cooked meals 4 nights a week
Laying these out will help by providing you guidance and accountability. By having clear key results, you know what you should be doing, and you can keep track of whether you’re on track.
With key results, it becomes much harder to say “I’ll do it later”, “there is still time”, and so on: you have clear guidance on what you should be doing, right now.
The same line of reasoning holds true in the professional world too. If you set yourself an objective like “become the industry leader”, it’s hard to know clearly what is the best thing you should be doing right now to get there, and whether you’re on track. Associating the objective to key results makes it much more tangible. In that particular case, key results indicating your success could be the satisfaction of your customers or the coverage you get in specialized press.
The genius of OKRs
This method may seem very simple, almost simplistic, but it is in fact profound. Objectives can be set regardless of the level of uncertainty, from a nascent venture to a mature company. By being inspirational, they help everyone understand why they are doing what they are doing.
But combining them with key results also means that there is a tangible and transparent way to track progress. Without them, the objective, while inspirational, would not be able to serve as a guide for the day-to-day work that the company does.
OKRs can also be set for any period of time. Usually, companies set them yearly and quarterly, but nothing prevents you from building longer-term objectives too, or monthly ones in the case of a very young project.
At any point, it is possible to know whether objectives are on track by checking progress against key results. If these are not attained at the end of a period, this can mean one of three things:
The resources of the company were not properly focused
The work required to achieve the key result was underestimated
The key result was neglected since it was felt that company resources were better used elsewhere
Whichever it is is an important learning: if the key result was mistakenly neglected, it may mean that OKRs should be tracked more regularly or integrated more tightly with other project management tools. If the work was underestimated, a more accurate estimation can be done on a subsequent period. If the work was neglected because it felt as being of lower priority, it can mean that the key result was not a good target in the first place and should be rethought.
This provides an incredibly powerful guidance and helps you prioritize your tasks, while not locking you into a system too rigid for your current state of uncertainty.
Wrapping up
OKRs are incredibly powerful and their formulation is very concise and simple. However, that simplicity can be deceptive: doing OKRs right takes practice.
If you’re going to do OKRs because they look easy you’re making a mistake. — niket on The Fundamentals
But while OKRs are hard to master, they are easy to start, and from the get go will give you an added measure of visibility into your project — be it a start-up, a large company, or even self-improvement.
Try them out.
Further reading
Here are some of the resources that I’ve used to learn about OKRs:
Measure What Matters, by John Doerr: an accessible book presenting OKRs, by the person who introduced them to Google
OKRs on re:Work, by Google: a short and practical introduction to OKRs
Workshop on how Google sets OKRs: long form video if you’re a more visual type, though some of its content is questionable
OKR team play by Atlassian: a practical exercise to get your team on board with OKRs
OKRs on The Fundamentals: an introduction with dos and don’ts, and some templates to get started
