Many top global companies have adopted the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology for setting strategic goals and tracking their outcomes. The methodology was originally created by Intel CEO Andy Grove who taught the methodology to John Doerr, former Intel executive, legendary venture capitalist and New York Times best-selling author of “Measure What Matters,” the definitive guide to adopting and implementing OKRs.
For those unfamiliar with the OKRs, it is the process of setting and communicating company, team and individual objectives and measuring their progress based on desired results. The process itself is simple: it focuses the attention on the outcomes as a way to meet ambitious, time-bound goals. The key results are measurable and quantifiable, make the objective achievable, lead to objective grading, are difficult, but not impossible, and are based on growth, performance, revenue or engagement. Organizations typically focus on 3-5 objectives, assigning an owner to each key result. Collaboration and communication on the progress of OKRs at all levels of the company is critical to connect individual contributors to executive leadership.
Beginning in 2020, Contegix leadership adopted the OKR process. As digital collaboration experts, we immediately realized that to receive the full benefit of the process, we had to implement the OKRs into a single tool that would help us drive real-time collaborative interactions. Being one of Atlassian’s top Platinum partners who consults on digital collaboration with some of the world’s largest companies, the answer was to use the same solution that we deliver to our customers – Confluence. Within an hour of the decision to use Confluence as our collaboration hub, we had converted our OKR spreadsheet into a Confluence template, published the page and established the update cadence.
With the launch of the Confluence OKR space, every team references their OKR page, updates their progress and has strategic discussions. This change has saved us time and money by focusing on what matters most instead of wasting time debating on the data accuracy, version control issues, awareness of changes, and more. Additionally, Atlassian makes it easy to adopt by providing templates and tools to help you get started.
Now that we are well into 2021, we are benefiting from the increased collaboration and transparency that Confluence offers. Our quarterly OKRs are certainly ambitious as we strive to deliver on our mission of making lives easier for developers and IT teams. We plan to update our OKRs each quarter as we continue to grow, evolve, and serve our customers.
If you’re interested in setting up your own OKR process we’ll be happy to share our experience. Contact us today to get the conversation started.