OKRs
[Name redacted] December 2021-January 2022
Proof of concept
The problem
ORKs are being recorded in separate Excel docs. It’s hard to share/update OKRs within and across teams if they are in Excel.
My role
Consulting, Interaction design, Information architecture, Research
Overview
We were approached to come up with a proof of concept to help a billion dollar organization implement OKRs. The timeline was 6 weeks. Historically this organization’s leaders created OKRs within their own Excel docs and would share their goals in a brainstorm meeting. Initially they gave the problem to the IT department and they built a solution using ADO (Azure Dev Ops). This solution works but it wasn’t user friendly. Technical (or Agile users) users kept associating their regular work items to KR (key results) and Non-Technical (non Agile users) didn’t want to bother looking at ADO at all.
The request was to work with their IT team to determine a solution that could be scaled company wide to capture OKRs (Objects, Key Results).
The team that built the ADO solution wanted to keep ADO as the primary engine.
Users stories as told by a flow chart
Our solution/recommendation
We built a Power App to capture the OKR data and the Power App will feed said data into ADO and ADO will report that data to Power BI
The landing page below is the view of someone (think middle manager) that has key results assigned to them by their manager and it’s at the top since its what this user needs to focus on but below are their own objectives. The organization we are designing for has a very “top down” approach in which the OKR’s will cascade throughout the organization.
Landing page of OKR’s once the user log in.
Because of the cascade of the OKRs a person is always able to link their own objects to the key result assigned to them from their manager. Having the ability to link to the key result within the form itself allows the action to happen but in a narrow way to ensure no mistakes are made.
Create objective form in the style supported by Microsoft Power Apps
Once the objective is created the user will land on the “Objective Details” page. This page shows the full objective and any key results they assign to others to fulfill the objective. Having a separate page for the objective itself also maintain the integrity of the linking because a key results can only be created from the page that houses the objective itself. Clicking “Add Key Result” will lead to a form that looks very similar to “Add Objective” and the chain of OKRs keeps going on and on until all goals are defined.
Objective details page in a style supported by Microsoft Power Apps
Impact
I’m proud of our team for creating an app that met the clients goals of using the ADO solution they created while making the input of information more user friendly. However, while we met the client’s goal our team personally thinks the organization will be better served with a dedicated OKR tool such as ally.io (which was recently acquired by Microsoft!). Since this was a proof of concept we delivered on the exact ask but if we were to come back to this project we would pitch the idea of ally.io again since it may already be included in this organizations Microsoft 365 subscription.