The setting and measuring of goals in the Wecomplish platform is built around the universal goal-setting framework OKR.
OKR us short for Objectives and Key Results and is a methodology ideal for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes in agile teams.
An OKR is made up of an objective - a clearly defined goal - and specific measures used to track the achievement of that goal. The goal of OKR is to define how to achieve objectives through concrete, specific and measurable actions.
Here's an example of what an OKR looks like in Wecomplish:
Objectives are managed in the context of a team to promote aligning OKRs with the teams purpose. To create a new objective, navigate to the team and select OKR in the left hand side navigation or use quick create.
The objective can be in one of the following states:
By adding initiatives you raise awareness of how work is associated with objectives as well as increase the likelihood of work actually being aligned with objectives.
Initiatives can be pre-existing projects or tasks defined in the platform. Items added as initiatives display their related objectives on the reverse side.
By adding an owner, responsible and contributors you make it clear who is expected to hold which role in the achievement of the objective.
The people you add you add will see their objectives, grouped by their role, in their "Planned work" view.
By adding key results you make it more clear how the team plans to measure the achievement of the objective.
Each key result has a current and target performance expectation, making it clear and measurable to which extent objectives are met.
The OKR methodology comes with the following recommendations for key results:
The platform suports tracking progress on key results, so that we can more easily follow how close we are to achieving the result.
Progress is typically reported by the person responsible for the objective, making it easily available to all other objective stakeholders.
To track progress on a key result, click the key result and then click the green plus-icon in relation to the Progress-header. Progress is indicated by a percentage of the target for the key result (aka fulfillment).
When viewing an objective, the list of key results includes a progress bar of the most recent progress indication.
Key results can be manually sorted in the order you would like. This can be useful if the nature of the objective makes is natural to tackle one key result at a time, in a specific order.
Click and drag the hamburger-icon on the rigth-hand side of a key result in order to give it its preferred priority.
Objectives come in different shapes and sizes. Some are high-level and long-lasting (aka North Star Objectives), whereas others are more concrete, shorter lived and exist primarily to impact higher level objectives.
For instance, a product team objective of improving self-service abilitites and a sales team objective of closing x deals within the quarter might both be designed to impact a higher level Annual Recurring Revenue objective.
Ideally, any objectives we set out to accomplish can somehow be associated with on or a select few top level objectives.
In order to better understand how objectives are meant to impact eachother, the platform allows for relating objectives to other objectives they are expected to impact.
Relating objectives is done under the "Related objectives" section in the right column of an objective.
When relating objectives you decide if you want to relate objectives that are:
If you are looking to break down a big and unmanagable objective into smaller objectives that can be more easily managed, the Sub objectives function might be a better fit.
To view all active, related objectives across the entire organization, check out Organizational objectives.
Some objectives are too big to tackle on their own, or for any one person to be responsible for. In order to break more complex objectives into smaller, more managable objectives, use the sub objectives. Sub objectives allow you to create a hierarchy of objectives however deep you would like.
If you are looking to break up a high level objective into more concrete objectives managed by different teams, the Related objectives function might be a better fit.
The Organizational objectives overview allows us to:
The report displays all objectives across all teams that are either in the planning or focusing stage.
The report takes Related objectives into account, indenting objectives that impact eachother under eachother. The top level objectives (after taking related objectives into account) are grouped by team.
The right column includes a team-navigation displaying which teams own how many objectives in the current view. By clicking on the team name, the objectives owned by that particular team light up.
Ideally, every active team objective is tied to a more high-level objective on the organizational level. You should therefore strive to have only the team representing the organization appear as a group in the left column.
If you have multiple team groups appear, it might be an indication that the impact of those objectives on higher level objectives are poorly understood, or worse yet, that the objective is not designed to impact a higher level objective (in which case it should probably be abandoned).