OKRs in Clarity: Corporate Goals at the Center of Your Daily Activities

OKR is on everyone’s lips. You might be forgiven for thinking that it is just another business fad. The crux of the matter is: The OKR method will not be forgotten tomorrow. It is <strong>a tried and true, highly successful management framework</strong>.

As early as the <strong>1970s</strong>, Andy Grove devised the OKR method and used it to put Intel on the road to success. John Doerr later introduced the method to Google, which is the company best exemplifies the OKR model today. OKRs have shown their effectiveness everywhere from global corporations, like Intel, Google, LinkedIn, Zalando, and Daimler to a variety of medium-sized companies, start-ups, and small businesses. Even individual employees have applied them successfully. So let’s talk about it:

• What is OKR?
• Wie formulieren Sie gute OKRs?
• What added value does Clarity offer for your OKR management?
• Our best practices for successful implementation

OKR – What Is It?

The acronym OKR stands for objectives and key results, which are the two central levers that the method uses to help your company achieve progress. Hence, the two fundamental questions addressed by OKRs are:

• What do we want to achieve?
• How do we know if we have achieved it?

Agile OKR is a management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.

John Doerr|Author of the Book "Measure What Matters"

Autor des Buches "Measure What Matters"

It is a matter of making qualitative goals (objectives) measurable using quantitative goals (key results). It is clear even from an initial consideration: The focus of OKRs is on the end result to be achieved, but the path that is taken to get there is not set in stone and is flexible. The call to make corporate goals transparent, clearly understandable, and measurable is at the core of OKRs.

The Added Value You Get from OKRs

There are many good reasons to use OKRs as a framework for setting your goals. We have summarized the method’s major advantages for you:

• Measurability of goals: OKRs make goal achievement measurable and assessable.
• Making the contribution to the company's success visible: The progress of achieving the OKRs is clearly visible at all times, and employees can use the results to see in real time how their own work improves the team or company's performance.
• Active participation: OKRs provide employees with the opportunity to actively participate in defining and implementing goals. This promotes identification with the goals and intrinsic motivation.
• Encouraging creativity and innovation: Focusing on results instead of activities leaves plenty of room for creativity and encourages individuals to adopt new approaches. Setting ambitious goals, allowing mistakes, and actually living a learning culture within the framework of the OKR method also boost the innovative power of your company.
• Greater level of focus in everyday life: The OKR method helps to break down the long-term corporate strategy into specific quarterly objectives and thus makes them tangible in the everyday lives of all stakeholders. This allows employees to focus on just a few concrete objectives.
• More transparency: OKRs create transparency. This can eliminate the silo mentality within departments and improve cross-departmental cooperation and communication.
• Rapid responsiveness: The OKR method allows companies to move towards strategic goals in a focused manner in short iterative three-month cycles, enabling rapid course corrections and a nimbleness to pursue trends.
• Maximum flexibility: Whether at the corporate, team, or individual level, the OKR method may be applied at different working levels. Moreover, the approach can basically be used to achieve any objectives, at any size company, and in all industries and administrative structures.

Checklist: Setting Up Good OKRs

Whether you have set up good objectives and key results that fit together and work can be checked using John Doerr’s OKR formula: “We will [objective] as measured by [set of key results].”

Example: World Food Company

2030 Strategy: Provide emission-free delivery of food products in all regions of the world

Q1-2022 Objective: Grow the brand

Q1-2022 Key Results:

• KR 1: Make 10,000 deliveries
• KR 2: Sign 5 major contracts
• KR 3: Launch marketing campaigns in 15 different countries
• KR 4: Achieve 50,000 Google searches of the company name
• KR 5: Publish 30 new blog posts

At itdesign, we have been working with OKRs for quite a while and have gathered some valuable resulting experience. We have compiled some of our best practices to help you avoid typical pitfalls and take full advantage of the method.

Managing OKRs in Clarity

Advantages of Clarity for Implementing OKRs

Visibility of Corporate Goals

With Clarity as a single source of truth, OKR management can be handled in the same tool as your project, portfolio, and resource management. Strategy and goals are thus closely tied to everyday processes and integrated into a tool that is already in use in your company. The ability to link project management and OKR management has great added value: Projects can be easily and straightforwardly linked directly to the key results and objectives to which they contribute. Clarity thus helps to make goals more transparent and the contributions of employees more visible.

High Usability

Working with OKRs should inspire, motivate, and be fun. Usability is a crucial factor here. In Clarity, thanks to the intuitive interface and a wide range of filter options, your users can configure and store their own views, consolidate information, highlight deviations in KRs by color, and more.

Simultaneous Editing

Unlike classic Excel-based solutions, users can work simultaneously on OKRs at any time without having to manually consolidate different lists afterwards. This eliminates potential sources of error right from the outset and avoids unnecessary effort. Moreover, it facilitates coordination and collaboration across departments and allows conflicting goals to be identified and resolved at an early stage.

High Degree of Configurability

OKR management is a highly customized process that thrives on flexibility. Objectives and key results vary from company to company and from quarter to quarter. Clarity allows you to customize your OKR process without being restricted by the limitations of the tool you are using. For example, you decide which metrics are necessary and should be calculated for your KRs or which views you need.

Clear Status Reporting

Clarity provides you with real-time insights on the progress made towards achieving your goals. From continuously updated statistics to Power BI reports to special OKR dashboards, Clarity offers you everything you need to track your OKRs and visualize the status quo. This gives you and your employees a constant overview of where you stand with regard to specific key results and allows you not only to check progress in real time, but also to motivate your employees.

Identify Trends at an Early Stage

Clarity provides a record of all important data related to KRs. This allows you to easily track progress over time and identify relevant events, turning points, and trends.

Automated Reminder E-mail

An automated e-mail reminds the KR managers to make their entries in the system on a weekly basis. This ensures that the KRs are updated regularly and reliably, and allows you to track where you stand in terms of achieving your objectives.

Overview of Correlations

Clarity’s Hierarchy module allows you to display the OKR hierarchy, consisting of strategy, objectives and key results, in a clear and consolidated tree structure. This gives you an overall picture at a higher level and always presents the most important information in front of you. If you want to show more details, you can adjust your hierarchies at any time.

All Clarity Features at a Glance

• Use of Custom Investments to represent strategy, objectives, and key results
• Visual representation of the OKR hierarchy using the Hierarchy module
• Integration of Power BI reports to display current interim results in a status report
• Individual configuration of additional dashboards
• Weekly reminder e-mail to all KR managers
• Customer-specific assignment of edit rights and view rights
• Automatic calculation of customer-specific key figures and benchmarks
• Highlighting of positive and negative deviations by color
• Diverse filter and configuration options for creating individual views

Clarity provides you with all the important features you need for professional OKR management. And all that in a tool that you already use, that the employees at your company already work with, and for which you pay money anyway! Take advantage of the synergy effects and start using OKRs in Clarity.

Our Best Practices for Implementing OKRs

itdesign as Your Implementation Partner

It is our pleasure to help you implement your OKRs in Clarity. What advantage can we offer and what sets us apart? Experience.

We have not only overseen implementation projects for our customers, but we also have several years of experience working with OKRs in Clarity. Based on this experience and the solution approaches we have developed, we can also help you to implement OKR management in Clarity. This way you can get started quickly and without complications. We know the challenges and benefits of the approach from our own day-to-day work and look forward to sharing our experience with you.

If you are interested in using OKRs at your company, we offer you a comprehensive package. Feel free to contact us with no obligation!