Let the context guide your OKR aspiration
We're all aware that our key results should be aspirational or uncomfortably exciting, as Larry Page puts it. One factor that I don't hear talked about much is the time available to the team owning the OKR. Goals are time-bound, often quarterly, but not all quarters are created equally. For example, nobody does as much in Q4.
When coaching teams, a common theme is their desire to shoehorn their commitments into OKRs. This desire takes the form of turning a task that has been assigned to them into a key result. We know that tasks are a form of output, not outcome, so they don't make good key results.
In some cases, we can work backwards to the why and uncover a meaningful outcome, but it's not always the case. Sometimes teams just have to do stuff that's mandated.
An example from one organisation was a migration to an enterprise code repository. It wasn't a trivial task, and it promised to eat some serious time. For the team, it wasn't driving anything related to their product, it wasn't solving a customer problem, and it didn't even improve their delivery metrics.
We can all think of many time-consuming tasks like this one. 'We just need to get this done.' That's not to say that they're meaningless tasks, they matter for the organisation, they're just not related to the team's focus.
What I advise teams to do now is to list those commitments and come up with a rough and ready estimate of the time they will take. This information doesn't belong in the OKRs, but it does help the team, and their leaders understand the working context.
In some cases, teams estimated that 60% of their time is already accounted for over the next month. This reduction in time is bound to limit the aspiration of your OKRs and the level of outcomes the team will achieve.
Sometimes teams have multiple commitments of this kind. Sharing the context with leaders creates an opportunity for discussion. Leaders may even help the team avoid or delay the commitments to help them focus on what matters most.
Next time you're setting OKRs, consider the stuff you committed to doing that isn't OKR related. You might be surprised just how much time is already spoken for.
You can handle this one of two ways with your OKR setting.
1. Ask people in advance to document any non-routine commitments for the next period. Also, ask them to create a rough estimate in person-months of how long it will take. I'd suggest doing this asynchronously in something like Google Sheets. The advantage of using a collaboration tool is that people can build on each other's input. This is my chosen approach. It protects the precious workshop time.
2. Spend 10 mins at the start of the meeting brainstorming the commitments and creating the estimates.
Be clear about the amount of non-OKR/top focus work you have in the upcoming quarter. Use that information to help set the aspiration level for your targets.
