[stavros]

Yes. OKRs for us (a mid-size? company, 150ish people) have been a disaster. They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else. It's been a lot of "this isn't in my OKRs, why should I work on it?", making it both hard to adjust course ("why would I work on this important thing when it's not an OKR?"), and to get the teams to help each other ("why would I work on their target when I have mine?")

Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.

[Jensson]

> They pit teams against each other, instead of aligning them with the business, by making them focused on their targets and nothing else.

Don't you have higher level umbrella targets that everyone can contribute to? OKRs are a tree, working on targets that aren't your teams but helps the bigger picture above you is also a feature of OKRs, you aren't meant to just look at your local OKRs.

[stavros]

We do, but if people feel that it will be bad if they don't hit their immediate goals, they're unlikely to want to contribute to anything but those.

Of course, it's better to be flexible, but when you give someone a goal, the goal is, well, the goal.

[Jensson]

If the company need those team to help other teams, then those teams should have OKRs to help other teams. A good OKR is that they need to respond and/or fix things in X hours etc, depending on what kind of support they are expected to give.

OKR shows you the state of the current organization, if the OKR are dysfunctional the organization is dysfunctional, it would be even if you didn't see the OKRs. The fix isn't to remove the OKRs, it is to align the OKRs with what each team is really expected to do as I said above.

If the team you need help from had an OKR to help you quickly, so they focused on that, do you really believe that would be a bad thing? That is the only way to do it, such teams are slow to respond and provide help everywhere that doesn't give them OKRs to reduce latency on responses, they always have their own things to work in regardless if they are visible or not.

Such OKR also makes life easier for that team, now they get rewarded for what they are supposed to do: provide support. And, if they don't have enough people to provide that support, now they have a good case to get more resources to enable them to provide that support.

[stavros]

You're saying that OKRs should be SLAs, instead of hitting specific objectives? Our OKRs tend to be "release these features/fixes", not things like "hit team metrics".

[Jensson]

Depends on the team, but yeah often time that is the most important you can work on, improving SLA metrics are excellent OKRs since they are easily measurable and are grease to the orgs cogs.

[stavros]

Makes sense, thank you.

[dsugarman]

Sounds like a people issue

[brookst]

If your small company (150 is small!) has groups that need to work together but have OKRs so orthogonal that they don’t, something is seriously wrong with the OKR implementation or the culture.

That kind of “not my OKR” nonsense shouldn’t happen in a 15,000 person company, let alone a company where everyone’s OKR’s are, what, two steps from the corporate ones?

[stavros]

Some feedback: Telling people "that's wrong" and leaving it at that isn't very useful. These days I try to either say something constructive, or nothing at all.

[brookst]

While I appreciate the feedback, I also subscribe to not trying to diagnose without enough information.

I believe it is accurate and constructive to say a 150 person company with OKRs producing counter-productive outcomes is doing it wrong, at least when replying to someone who seems to believe the problem is with the OKR model.

[runlaszlorun]

> Right now we're trying a combination of company-level objectives (not KRs) and Kanban, where the teams just work on the next most important objective they can.

Aha. That’s an interesting take I never would’ve thought of. Thx…