Writing in the front

With the successful practice of OKR in foreign companies such as Intel and Google, as well as domestic companies such as Bytedance and Huawei, more and more enterprises have realized the importance of OKR for organizational development and started to introduce OKR one after another. To introduce OKR corporate culture, a powerful OKR tool is essential. CODING OKR can provide enterprises with rich process practices and collaboration reminders, improve employee engagement, and promote the success of company operation and integration of production, research, operation and maintenance. The following will take CODING OKR as an example to explain the problems encountered by most enterprises when implementing OKR and some thoughts.

OKR definitions common on the web

1. The difference between OKR and KPI

OKR is positioned first and foremost as a communication tool, a plan-do-check-action loop. OKR requires how to accomplish an ambitious project more efficiently, so many project management tool vendors like to design OKR. In essence, KPI is a management tool. It mainly evaluates performance from results, not process, and uses indicators to speak. KPI emphasizes how to achieve a predetermined goal with both quality and quantity.

In theory, KPI must be formulated in strict accordance with SMART standards. Whether or even the proportion (less than or more than 100%) can be measured. OKR goals should be ambitious, challenging, and uncomfortable. Generally, the “optimal” OKR score is between 0.6 and 0.7, and if someone gets a 1, their OKR goals are clearly not ambitious enough; But the person with the low score should not be blamed, but should use the data at work to help him improve his OKR goals for the next quarter. CODING OKR is also about to introduce a scoring system and scoring reports to help companies establish feedback mechanisms more quickly and help employees better establish a sense of responsibility.

CODING OKR can be associated with items, and progress can be marked and recorded dynamically through the completion of related items, so as to evaluate whether the initial formulation and final completion of OKR are strongly correlated, which is convenient for the person in charge to adjust flexibly at any time.

Goals can be linked across projects, with related items independent of progress towards goals and key results

Based on the definition that OKR is the comfort zone of challenge, commitment goal can be understood as KPI, and ultra routine goal setting can be understood as OKR. OKR is the path, KPI is the result, unchanged is the result, change is the path, KPI has a very strong result orientation, and OKR requires multiple iterations step by step, which is particularly similar to the central idea of Agile Scrum advocated by CODING, which requires agile execution and rapid embrace of change.

2. How long will it take for OKR to take effect?

OKR itself is not complex. Compared to other traditional management tools, OKR is simple and easy to operate. The simpler things are, the more alive they are. In general, after OKR runs for a cycle in the enterprise (usually a cycle means a quarter, but it can also be performed bi-monthly, such as flying books), the team can master the process and method of OKR development, alignment, tracking, and reworking. After two or three cycles, the team can optimize the OKR operations to better match the actual work scenarios and business processes, depending on the actual situation of their work. After four cycles, the team will be thinking more about how to use OKR to promote self-growth and achieve organizational goals. The biggest takeaway from all these changes is that the team feels hopeful and motivated to be more proactive in promoting these positive changes.

OKR, like other management methods, is designed to help organizations improve the efficiency of resource utilization. The quantity and quality of resources do not have a direct impact on the purpose of using enterprise resources. OKR should be focused on strategy, logic, alignment, bottom-up, transparency and positive feedback. Only by strengthening these characteristics in practice can OKR play its due role.

3. Should the final result of OKR be tied to performance or bonus?

OKR is not synonymous with employee evaluation, nor is it intended to evaluate employees, but rather to remind everyone of what their core tasks are. OKR is related to the company’s goals and how each employee contributes to those goals. Performance evaluation (which is all about evaluating an employee’s performance over a fixed period of time) should be independent of its OKR. When companies started using OKR, managers commonly expressed concerns about whether teams would be motivated to practice since OKR was irrelevant to performance. This concern reflects three things:

1. Insufficient understanding of OKR by management;

Second, the management is not sure whether they have the ability and effort to promote the internal initiative of employees, and they worry that the lack of external temptation will lead to the lack of work, which is actually a cowardly performance in management.

Third, the management itself is not persistent and firm enough in the middle and late stage of implementing OKR. OKR advocates alignment and coordination to achieve the resultant force of the organization.

Over-incentivizing individuals weakens the power of synergy, leads to internal competition, and undermines open and transparent fields. Therefore, rather than individual motivation, we should pay more attention to team motivation.

4. How to conduct the OKR formulation discussion meeting?

The agenda for developing OKR is generally:

  1. The CEO (or Team Leader) explains the vision and big goals, and introduces the current industry changes, competitive environment and trend judgment;
  2. The COO (or team leader) and the host will draw the business indicators and events initially planned on the whiteboard or display them on a projector;
  3. Discuss key business indicators and events for preparation;
  4. According to the positioning of their own responsibilities, each person will write O in the personal objective column of CODING that he or she considers important. If it is not in the business indicators and events just discussed, he or she will add a mark in the CODING.
  5. Each person interprets the O set by himself. Sometimes, in order to save time, he will present and interpret the O separately in groups.
  6. Vote to determine O and create a location corresponding to CODING team goals;
  7. Use the same process to determine KR and associate corresponding items;
  8. Determine who is responsible for OKR and when to perform acceptance.

The goals details page provides a complete picture of the goals

5. How to measure the acceptance of OKR by team members to ensure the smooth implementation of OKR?

The team needs to establish three cultural atmospheres in the four stages of OKR implementation, follow-up, review, and scoring, namely respect, feedback, and recognition.

respect

During the initial attempt to implement OKR for six months to one year, employees should be encouraged to set their own personal goals, simultaneously coordinate with the measurement results of team goals, independently execute and feedback, and team management should not intervene strongly, but regularly observe and assist. Although many OKR articles tell us the concept of “team goals are bigger than individual goals”, it is suggested to do the opposite in the early implementation. Employees are encouraged to think about their own value and ability boundaries according to OKR SMART principle, and then explore the relevance and extensibility. At the same time, employees are told that we have achieved about 60% of the goals. This shows that our goal is right, might as well be bold.

Personal goal setting, progress review and adjustment

feedback

I understand that many HR or Team leaders worry about the acceptance of Team members in the early stages of implementing OKR. In fact, employees want to be “empowered” and “motivated”, rather than being told what to do by their manager. Employees also want to express their opinions to their manager, rather than working hard for a year only to find out what their manager thinks of their performance. Employees are also eager to share their goals and plans regularly, as well as to see how their colleagues are doing.

Open, transparent CODING OKR can help inspire them to think differently: Are these the right things for me/you/we to focus on? If I/you/we get them done, will it be seen as a great success? Do you have any suggestions for how I/we can do better?

Feedback can be very constructive, but only if it is specific. In a developmental organization, feedback is usually directed and arranged by the human resources department. In more mature organizations, feedback tends to be unconstrained, real-time, and multi-directional, and often takes place in an open-ended conversation, regardless of time or place, within the organization. For enterprises, the opportunity to achieve two-way communication between employees and their superiors is very valuable. For example, employees can ask managers what they need to do to be successful, and managers can know what help they need from employees. The introduction of Agile Scrum culture in analogical CODING includes five activities as follows:

  1. Backlog Grooming Meeting;
  2. Sprint Planning Meeting;
  3. Standup Meeting;
  4. Retrospective Meeting;
  5. There is a Retrospective Meeting.

Five Activities of Scrum

During the OKR implementation cycle, there are also OKR kickoff meetings, writing review meetings, quarterly review meetings, and awards for outstanding OKR executives. Scrum is a kind of agile in CODING, and CODING OKR is also a kind of agile. The implementation mainly focuses on people, emphasizing self-organization and self-drive. Only through continuous careful experience in practical application, can enterprises and organizations become more efficient and innovative with the gradual progress of agile or OKR.

recognition

  • Encourage peer recognition: When an employee’s accomplishments are unanimously recognized by his or her peers, it inspires a culture of gratitude;
  • Establish clear criteria for identifying whether employees are currently performing actions or results: completing special projects, achieving company goals, or demonstrating company value;
  • Sharing stories that increase recognition: Sharing the story behind these achievements can be done using a real-time communication tool, an internal company knowledge base, or a CODING Wiki to give recognition more meaning and increase the frequency and availability of recognition. Even small achievements should be praised. Such as putting in the extra effort to meet a deadline, polishing a proposal, or doing little things that managers take for granted.

6. Does OKR advocate public visibility for all members of the department?

Yes, transparency is one of OKR’s key principles. Bytedance, for example, has a distinctive management philosophy called “Context,not Control,” which expects employees to make decisions about what to do based on complete information and encourages proactive thinking rather than processes, superiors and orders. At Bytedance, everyone’s OKR is public, and even employees on their first day can see Zhang’s OKR directly.

“For example, we have a lot of cross-departmental collaboration, and it’s very common to sit in a meeting and not know who the other person is. What I often do is pick up my phone, open his profile picture, take a look at his OKR, and within half a minute I know what his main responsibilities and priorities are.” Therefore, at Bytedance, OKR is not only the result of top-down disassembly, but also related to the boss, colleagues in the department and colleagues across departments, which is the basis of efficient communication and collaboration. Using CODING OKR, you can set viewing permissions for different roles based on the organization structure, and of course, we encourage public visibility for all staff.

Choose Team Management > Permission Configuration to set permissions for the corresponding user groups

7. How to write KR in OKR? How should granularity be grasped?

  • If your KR is more than 2 lines, it is likely to be unclear.
  • If your KR descriptions are riddled with internal team jargon, such as “release CI metadata concatenation and access control capabilities”, they are generally not good KRS. What really matters is not the act of releasing, but the Impact it has. Why is metadata concatenation important? A better statement would be: “Release CI metadata series and access control capabilities, improve R&D standards, increase data flow perspective” or simply: “Improve R&D standards, increase data flow perspective”.
  • KR please use real dates. If all KR deadlines fall on the last day of the quarter, your plan is probably flawed.
  • Make sure your KR is measurable. It must be objectively graded at the end of each quarter. “Increase the number of registered users” is not a good KR, “increase the number of daily registered users by 25% by June 1” is a good KR.
  • Make sure the metrics are clear. If you say “a million users,” specify whether you’re referring to full-time users or just 7-day active users.
  • It has to be production-oriented, not action-oriented. If your KR contains words like “consult,” “help,” “analyze,” and “participate,” then it actually describes actions rather than results. In contrast, if you describe the impact of these actions on the end user, for example: “Update the automation use case library by June 7 for fast and accurate automation execution” is a qualified KR, while “update the automation use case Library” is not.
  • It must be able to self-prove that it has been completed, that the evidence is readily available and reliable. For example, evidence can be a Wiki on CODING, a web disk, or a specific project dynamic, such as a list of changes within the project, document links, published quality reports, etc.

You can add and edit key results and adjust indicator weights

8. How do programmers make OKR?

How can a programmer’s work be quantified? Bugs? Lines of code? Version number? But none of these indicators is feasible. Or comparing lines of code, bugs, versions, or shares between teams? None of that actually works. Who wants to do forward-looking work? Who wants to do risky work? For example, the introduction of ElasticSearch can theoretically improve search performance, but it may cause a lot of problems in the year it is introduced, and the amount of revenue it will bring is uncertain. How to make OKR?

Assuming that the CTO receives the CEO’s big strategic goal of “user growth of 20%”, he should develop a KR that members of the department can understand and start working on based on the team’s resource strengths, such as:

  1. Technical indicators that affect user growth include “installation package size”, “App startup time”, “App crash rate”, “App power consumption”, etc. Assuming that the technical team thinks that the current installation package is too large and the App startup time is too long after analysis, these two related optimizations can be regarded as the TECHNICAL team’s OKR: The App installation package has been reduced from 20M to 8M, and the App startup time has been optimized from 2s to 500ms. It is almost impossible for business leaders to propose these two KRS.

  2. One of the reasons affecting the positive feedback of users is that the release pace is too slow, which is because there are too many versions but not enough test environment, and the test environment is not enough machines. Then we can get a goal: to solve the problem that the lack of test environment leads to version waiting. The decomposed KR can be “add 4 test environment machines” (yes, it’s a simple thing, but this can also be a KR), or “introduce Docker to support one machine to build 20 environments” (this KR is more technical).

  3. One of the reasons affecting user analysis and growth is the slow internal collaboration and requirement flow. It often takes a week for the production and research side to split user stories into corresponding versions. The process of splitting and evaluating user stories is likely to be recorded and reminded by some tools that are not easy to use. It is especially important to re-evaluate an R&D project management tool. CODING is a code management, project coordination, test management, continuous integration, products tools such as library, continuous deployment, team knowledge base of one-stop research and development of software management platform, collaborative links with iteration in project management, requirements and flexible segment to follow up the kanban view, very suitable for innovative enterprise flexible management needs and rapid iteration.

Powerful and flexible project management functions make the team work together efficiently

By thinking and decomposing in the above ways, the final technical team needs to do the following:

  • Rapid implementation of CODING agile development and DevOps development to achieve r&d efficiency upgrade.
  • The App installation package was reduced from 20 MB to 8 MB.
  • App startup time has been optimized from 2s to 500ms.
  • Introduction of Docker, support one machine to build 20 sets of environment.

conclusion

OKR is an important framework for agile strategic business management, project planning and portfolio management. It is hoped that CODING can help the team to carry out the four stages of OKR including initiation, writing, follow-up and review more perfect, and record the challenges completed by team members and their contributions to the team at any time.