OKRs: remember to follow up

Sometimes in a store, you choose a beautiful plant, like love at first sight. After that, you place that plant in the best spot in your house with the right sunlight, humidity, and space. You take care of it with the correct amount of water, and so on…. After a few days, that plant became part of your life.

Then, you have a few possible scenarios:
– The plant has adapted to the new environment and looks good.
– The plant is wilting.

The first scenario, of course, is the best. However, you cannot let your guard down because you need to take care of that plant when you go on vacation, or when it is summer, spring, or winter. These variables will change your behavior in order to keep that plant in a good condition.
In the second scenario, you can ask someone (family, friend, or a specialized blog) for help or you can try to change things yourself. Asking someone with more experience for help is better than following your sedentary instincts, but the most important thing is that you are aware of what’s going on and ready for a change to keep your plant alive.

You set yourself the goal of caring and keeping that plant alive. Its key results are related to water, sunlight, killing bugs, and more. But you need to be vigilant and change the behavior around it if the plant’s vital signs are not good.

This analogy can be also applied to OKRs: you need to take care of them and be ready to follow up, change, and ask for help. The world’s context is changing all the time, and you need to be ready to change direction, to help and motivate your teams, or your projects will be at risk. If your teams just set up their OKRs and go back to their daily tasks, the methodology will fail.

Getting ready

The OKR methodology is clear and simple: you must set your main goal, your objectives, and your key results to achieve them. But spreading this methodology across a company will be difficult and you will need the right tools to monitor your team’s progress and be ready for change.

You can set your goals by looking for examples, or trying your best, but we assure you that is much better to ask an expert. When it comes to successful OKR implementation, having the right OKR software is important and Axy OKR is the best option for any Salesforce-dependant business.  However, knowing how to create effective OKRs is just as important if you want to ensure that your company goals are achieved.

There are many ways to learn how to create effective OKRs, but if you want to get personalized training and make sure that your team is following all of the top OKR best practices, it is imperative that you learn from OKR experts.

Our goals require continuous review and adjustment*

OKRs are meant to drive focus, alignment, and agility into the team that uses them. They are never going to be 100% accurate. Like our feature choices, they are assumptions – our best guesses – about how we believe we will be successful. As we ship ideas to market quickly we collect data. That data informs our next steps and affords us the ability to change course – to be agile – if the work we’re doing isn’t driving the behavior we assumed it would. A regularly cadenced review is required to ensure we can answer the following questions:

1. Do our key results still make sense?
2. Should we measure a different set of customer behaviors?
3. Are our goals realistic? Are they too high? Too low?
4. What adjustments should we make going forward?
   

Done quarterly, an OKR review provides the team with enough information to answer these questions and decide how best to adjust their plan. The decisions made at these meetings should not be surprises. The team and their stakeholders should have been monitoring the KR’s over the previous 12 weeks. The quarterly review is designed to determine what the team has learned and what course corrections they suggest. Given all the unknowns in digital product development, this continuous review allows teams to redefine success based on the latest facts on the ground.
(*Source: https://jeffgothelf.com/)

Axy OKR: Follow up on the progress

Using Salesforce solutions plus Axy OKR, all of your data is already there, meaning that you don’t have to export it to any new platform. All your employee records, reports, dashboards, etc., are already within the system and can be cross-referenced from any other app within Salesforce! This can be extremely useful when you need to implement OKRs across your organization.

Axy OKR will provide you with the right tools to keep track of your OKRs and be ready to prevent, change or create new ones in order to adapt and be on the right path to success. Some features for that are:

• Tree view
• Planning and wrap-up
• My Focus
• One on ones
• Review management

Try now Axy OKR FREE for 30 days or take it for a spin on the Test Drive.

Need more information? Get in touch with our team for a custom demo!