OKRs

To the point: what's an OKR?

OKR stands for Objective & Key Results.

The internet has myriad definitions, but the crux of it is that it’s a goal-setting practice that many organizations use to drive measurable impact. The Digital Office’s OKR practice is in development, and we’re likely to see it shift as we mature & grow.

So what’s the difference between an outcome, an objective, a key result, an epic, etc, etc, etc?

That’s hard to say! Many people in our ecosystem are using these words in different ways, and the overlap is confusing. For our purposes:

OUTCOME/OBJECTIVE: Our team is using these interchangeably. Yes, they’re different things. Yes, we want to be outcome-focused. But with so many people across the Digital Office using “objective,” we want to be sure we can be understood. For us, this means the change we’re trying to effect, the impact we’re trying to have, etc. These are usually 1-2 year long goals. You can find the Chief Digital Officer’s objectives for 24/25 here and the Talent & Capacity branch objectives for 24/25 here.

KEY RESULTS/INITATIVES: The measurable pieces of work that lets us know whether we’re making progress toward our objective(s) or not. You’ll sometimes hear others across the Digital Office refer to these as quarterly goals or quarterly OKRs (it’s confusing!). These are the scoped down increments of work that team’s bring across the line in 1-2 quarters, and they’re tracked by the Senior Management Team on https://bcdevex.atlassian.net/jira/software/c/projects/DO/boards/61?assignee=5e8245da68b30b0c1ac676f0&assignee=70121%3A78ae9e67-24cf-4c4b-9691-63ecacca8c7d&assignee=70121%3A9879a257-1059-4575-bb26-a31e32c3e325&assignee=557058%3Af81026df-3e09-40a5-b450-705bdbe44937&assignee=5a9ef0cddafd4b2a7d6eaeb1&assignee=6245caa52e101c006a8e820c&assignee=712020%3Aea7bc5b0-7d9e-4ced-a474-6257111ea441 (Permissions on this are wacky right now - if you can’t see the board, rest assured that we’re working on it). The PO will work with the team and the leadership teams to draft these each quarter and update progress within these pages. For the sake of sustainable pace, we try not to have more than three each quarter for our team. Less is better!

EPIC: Different teams mean entirely different things when using this word, but for us it’s a JIRA-only term and a way to organize our buckets of work. Often, we’ll make an epic in JIRA for all the backlog items we need to complete to accomplish our key result.

Do our OKRs tie into a greater strategy or vision?

Yes and no. Should they? Absolutely. But we’re a brand new branch and a pretty new division. Our leadership teams have some work to do around building all these foundational pieces.

For now, you should be able to see the alignment between our objectives and Mission 4 of the Digital Plan. Creation of the Digital Talent Strategy is a piece of work currently being undertaken by a cross-divisional executive group - updates on this work to come soon!

What on earth is a “Decoder Ring”?

Not quite as good as the prize at the bottom of your cereal box, but almost.

The Decoder Ring is a scoring rubric that Digital Office leadership teams use to estimate and compare the priority value of any piece of work we might bring into our backlog. If you’re part of the DO, you can find the latest iteration of the rubric and supporting documentation here. By charting the value something might have against how much effort or capacity it will take our teams, we’re able to make better decision about what we spend our limited time working on.

No piece of work can make it out of the backlog and into our active OKRs without being scored by the Decoder Ring.

Who decides the OKRs for our team?

Oh what a tangled web we weave…

Collaborative leadership and teaming makes this a little more nuanced. Try this <to insert link: infographic on our scaled scrum leadership> and see if it helps. Reach out to the PO if you need more clarity.

What are the timelines around OKR planning?

OKR planning for the following quarter starts 6-8 weeks before the quarter begins. This means while teams are in the middle of completing one set of key results, product owners and leadership are tracking progress and already making decisions about the quarter to come.

The PO will engage the team to discuss quarterly progress and get their opinions on what backlog work they think is priority about halfway through the quarter. The leadership team will then meet and discuss blockers, risks, and dependencies for all of the different teams' work before opening up the entire branch backlog of work to all teams for feedback and questions. Quarterly OKRs are due to the Senior Management Team 2 weeks before a quarter starts.

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Got another question?

Let the team product owner Justine Houchin or scrum master Priya S. know.