OKR, in my understanding, is a powerful tool for objective management, but there are some problems in the actual work, please kindly answer them.
How does OKR relate to project management? How do I land Objective?
When making an OKR, be careful and have a chance of getting it done. Aggressive demands make goals challenging. But OKR just talks about how we set goals, how we align goals. It doesn’t talk about how to get there. Or to be very general: This exciting goal, your heartfelt goal, let’s do our best to achieve it. But the actual implementation is not so ideal:
(1) Priority processing still exists. Try to have as few goals as possible, but with so few goals, there are still priorities and trade-offs. Even if there is only one goal, subtasks are prioritized after decomposition. So to what extent is it your best effort to achieve that goal? Some targets do, will not be allocated resources. So is the decision to abandon this goal, or to abandon the subgoals of another goal?
(2) In my personal understanding, project management and planning should be based on objectives. It may be to finish the Objective first, and then set up the project. Once the project is implemented, then people are more concerned with the actual situation of the project, and the original Objective may not be as concerned. There are even some objectives that you write thinking you might have the resources to do it, but in reality, it doesn’t make any progress at all, and in the end the implementation of the Objective has to do with the implementation of other objectives. Is it true that OKR’s biggest role is to raise a flag and let people know where they are going? The rest can only be done in other ways?
How to combine top-down and bottom-up? Can only depend on the management art level of the manager?
Top-down is natural. How do you do that from the bottom up? Top-down is because the top controls the resources, of course, their demands are expressed. Bottom-up, if you don’t get support for all kinds of objectives, you’re stuck with writing down that O. You don’t have the resources to implement that Objective, and the biggest resource for that Objective is probably you. Bottom-up may only be a way for managers to gather information: why don’t you all say what you think? I’ll pick a few that meet my expectations and implement them.
Although I know OKR’s emergence is part of a bottom-up approach. But in the process of bottom-up implementation, I didn’t feel that OKR could really achieve bottom-up implementation.