Objectives and key results (OKR) has been around since the 1970s. Success stories like that of Google have led to widespread attention in recent years for the goal-setting framework due to its easy-to-understand concept and benefits. The need for transparency, adaptability and radical customer focus in an ever-evolving economic landscape has been a significant success factor for OKR.
While many companies recognize the impact that OKR can have on their business, many hesitate to implement the framework as they fear the complexity. Naturally, every organization already has specific metrics, concepts, and frameworks to organize its internal processes. They fear that adding another framework on top of that might interfere with existing practices and add unnecessary complexity to their internal structures.
The truth, however, is exactly the opposite. OKR is a very simple yet powerful framework that integrates well with other concepts and adds certain benefits to each of them. When it comes to traditional goal management with quantitative metrics, OKR, with its qualitative traits, provides a customer-centric view that creates focus on what’s really important. In already agile environments, OKR aligns the whole organization toward strategic goals. Even other goal-management frameworks benefit from OKR and vice versa.
This guide discusses the most common concepts and frameworks and explains how OKR can be integrated to create synergies for modern goal management.