Concepts - OKRs & objective cycles

Owned by Annu
Last updated: Sept 14, 2020
2 min read

OKRs - Objectives & Key Results

Objectives & Key Results is a goal-setting methodology, popularized by its incredible success at Google & Intel. UpRaise makes use of this philosophy and helps teams set goals within Jira. 

Difference between an Objective & a Key Result

Most of the  OKR software available treat objective and key results the same way. UpRaise treats them a little differently from each other. Key Results are sort of unit building blocks, they cannot be further distributed to multiple people neither they can receive contribution from another objective. Whereas Objectives are at a higher level than Key Results and can be easily further distributed into multiple key results as well as contributing objectives. 

OKR levels

Objectives & Key Results exist at different levels in UpRaise - company, team & individual. Depending on the org structure team OKRs can assume differing levels such as department OKRs, division OKRs, team OKRs etc. 

Alignment

Alignment is of vital importance in OKRs. By creating alignments amongst different levels of objectives, one can ensure better visibility and automatic progress roll up from the lowest level to the highest. 

Important to note that UpRaise does not restrict alignment to match with the org structure. Which means X's objective can be aligned with Y's even if they are not on the same team. As long as the aligned objectives do not create a circular relationship, the alignments are valid.

Objective cycle

Objective cycles act as containers for all levels of OKRs. We recommend quarterly objective cycle cadence for team and individual objectives for best results. Start & end dates of the objective cycle, along with the additional settings dictate behaviour of objectives which belong to the corresponding objective cycle.

Company objectives can be longer in duration than team and individual objectives. In such a case, you can create separate objective cycles for company objectives with semi-annual, annual or any custom duration. Note that system does not restrict you adding company objectives in any of the objective cycles. 

 

At the time of installation, system automatically creates objective cycles for 4 quarters.