How to use OKR to manage your team; a Port Cities case study

#9 - OKR helped us to mange our growing business, but we also made many mistakes

Welcome to issue #9 of Odoo Trailblazer, our journey to become the #1 Odoo partner.

TL;DR:

• Objectives and Key Results, or OKR, is a tool to manage teams and control performance.

• Using OKR has been critical to controlling our international growth and managing our teams (remotely).

• Our top mistakes in implementing OKRs were to lose the needed discipline over time or make it too complex.

I can finally “rest” at home after a few weeks of business trips. I joined our team at the “Japan IT Week” in Tokyo Big Sight. I don’t speak Japanese, so I didn’t meet many people, but my team got a few interesting prospects.

This week I’ll write about the famous concept of OKR introduced by Andy Grove at Intel.

Here is today’s agenda:

1. Introduction

2. Using OKR in my business (Port Cities)

3. What worked and didn’t

4. Next steps with OKRs at Port Cities

5. Conclusion

1. Introduction

OKR, or Objectives and Key Results, is a powerful goal-setting framework that has gained widespread popularity among businesses of all sizes. 

I first learned about OKR from Google articles and then from the book "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr. Its potential to drive alignment, transparency, and accountability in my business intrigued me. 

After further researching and studying best practices, I implemented OKR in my organization.

Today, I will share my experience with implementing OKR, what worked and what didn't, key lessons learned, and how we plan to use it moving forward.

2. Using OKR in my business (Port Cities)

So how do we use OKR in our business?

Here are some best practices:

1. Set ambitious Objectives that align with your business strategy.

2. Define specific, measurable Key Results that indicate progress towards your Objectives.

3. Cascade OKRs throughout the organization for alignment.

4. Track progress regularly and update as needed.

5. Foster transparency and accountability.

6. Encourage a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

7. Learn and adapt as you go.

OKR is a flexible process that requires customization to suit your organization's needs. Regular reflection and adjustments are the keys to success.

People usually recommend defining quarterly or yearly OKRs for the company and then for each team.

At Port Cities, we define OKR per region or team and review them at least once a month during the monthly review. We don’t have a fixed quarterly or yearly timeframe but review the targets when appropriate.

The tool we use is Google Sheets.

Some people advise using slides because it forces you to keep things simpler.

There are also other OKR tools out there, such as:

1. 15Five: Comprehensive OKR tool with goal alignment, progress tracking, and performance analytics.

2. Weekdone: Simple and easy-to-use OKR tool with visual dashboards for quick progress monitoring.

3. WorkBoard: Comprehensive OKR tool with goal alignment, progress tracking, and team collaboration.

Here are some examples of OKRs that we use to control a region.

A summary of our internal guidelines:

1. Proper structure and format: structure them by Objective, and then KR [key results]. Use proper timespan/time range.

2. Objectives are aligned with entities' strategic priorities and risks

3. OKRs follow group guidelines, definitions or strategy: don’t reinvent the wheel, a new way to measure margin or sales

4. KRs [key results] are Measurable and include key achievements: If you achieve your sales because our group is successful it’s not enough, you should improve your business!

5. Ambitious, consistent and feasible: […]Do you have the resources (team) to achieve it? […] Do not plan to measure many KPIs weekly if you don’t have the time to control it.

6. Use Weekly reporting or review based on OKR.

As you can see in this example, a region may be some business objectives: profit margin (EBIT), a revenue target, team development, and making their clients successful.

Let’s take the objective “2. Revenue”

We set several “key results” for each objective that could be seen as “sub-objectives”. We will typically achieve the main objective if we achieve all or enough sub-objectives.

For example, to make good revenue, we need to control the weekly billable rate of our consultants, but we also need enough “open sales orders” so our consultants have enough projects to work on. To have enough projects, we make sure to have enough sales. And to have enough sales, we ensure a good pipeline.

3. What worked and didn’t

What worked for us:

• It helped define clear team goals and align people, even those working remotely or in different countries.

• Frequent sharing of OKRs and early discussion of operational issues brought about transparency, enabling us to promptly take corrective actions or change our priorities. This was particularly helpful when we needed to re-prioritize time allocation, such as when the billable ratio or sales were too low.

• By including achievements in addition to KPIs in our OKRs, our team was compelled to make genuine improvements to the business.

Some of our mistakes:

• We set Key Results that were too difficult to track and missed controlling what was important.

• Over time, we lost the discipline to frequently control and review it, especially during our high growth phase, when the team responsibilities changed significantly.

• We were not decisive enough to change what didn’t work. The goal of measuring results is to analyze facts and change our strategy when it isn’t working. Most of the time, we realized that we didn’t change a manager or marketing campaign quickly enough if they didn’t work.

4. Next steps with OKRs at Port Cities

As we reorganize our business by region, we are updating all OKRs, and we’ll try to learn from our previous mistakes.

We will keep the same format and same fundamentals (typical metrics, etc.) but use them more rigorously and keep things simpler (i.e. avoid defining too complex OKRs).

First, we will review the OKR for;

1. Our group

2. Each region

3. Each group department: Sales, HR, Accounting, Cloud, …

Once done, I’ll share our target publicly, so other Odoo partners can learn from and we could also get some feedback.

5. Conclusion

I definitely recommend implementing OKR in most organizations from day 1. And I would definitely do it if I were to launch a new business.

That being said, I also learned that it is not easy to implement it successfully. So I’ll always remember my three tips for success:

1. Be extremely disciplined - this is probably the most important.

2. Keep things simple.

3. Ensure the OKRs align with the company priorities and the resources available (especially your time).

Now, I need to return to work and better use the OKRs in my business.

See you next week!

Follow us on LinkedIn for more updates: Gaspard (Founder & CEO) or Port Cities (our company page).

To learn more about Port Cities and how we help companies use Odoo (business software), visit our website.