OKR is a goal-setting framework that focuses on the ‘Why’ for each objective. Each OKR can be linked to a focus area to help create opportunities to move towards a goal.
In this OKR series, we’ve already talked about the basics of OKRs as well as the best tips to set OKRs for your organization. To further your understanding of the same and to help paint a better picture of objectives and key results (OKRs), we are going to take the help of OKR examples.
OKR examples can be a great source of inspiration for setting up and developing good OKRs for your organization.
In this article, we are going to discuss OKR examples and OKR templates for the project management domain. This would give you a better idea of how to make the most out of your OKRs.
Table of Contents
Understanding project management
Before getting into OKR examples and OKR templates for project management, let’s first understand what project management is.
Project management is the process of applying knowledge, expertise, skills, tools, and techniques to complete a project as per specific needs. The goal of project management is to identify a problem, create a plan to solve this particular problem, and then ensure that the plan is executed well until the problem has been solved.
There are five key stages of project management –
1. Initiation – This stage involves defining a project or a problem that needs to be solved.
2. Planning – This stage is about creating a roadmap that everyone in the team can follow.
3. Execution – The execution stage is about putting the roadmap into practice by following the steps outlined.
4. Monitoring – This stage is about measuring the performance of the project while ensuring that it stays on track and follows the roadmap.
5. Closing – The final stage is the completion of the project, analyzing the milestones, and finally finishing or transferring the project to another team.
Project management is important since it helps –
• Adhere to project budgets and schedules.
• Resolve various roadblocks and recurring issues.
• Analyze and identify loss-making projects and terminate the same.
• Improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• Improve team collaboration.
That might seem like a lot. But thanks to various software, project management becomes much easier. A good project management software can reduce your efforts and optimize the time you spend managing different aspects. These tools allow you to be more strategic with your resources.
A project management software can be used for project planning, project scheduling, resource allocation, budgeting, monitoring, workflow management, documentation, and quality management, etc.
OKRs in project management
In project management, you often have as much as 30-40 actions that need to be completed. This may bog down your overall focus as you might get lost in the details of individual tasks. As a result, you may lose sight of the reasons why you had planned those tasks in the first place.
OKRs in project management help solve this problem by ensuring that your focus is on the results and outcomes of your efforts instead of only on completing the tasks.
You can use OKR software to help you keep track of your OKRs. These tools can be used in collaboration with your existing project management tools like Asana, Basecamp, Jira, etc.
OKRs examples and templates for project management
Here a few examples of OKRs for project management. You can also use these as OKR templates to further create your specific OKRs. So, feel free to copy and modify them as needed.
OKR example 1: Successfully launch version 3 of our main product
• Collect more than 10,000 new signups.
• Have product reviews published in over 15 outlets.
• Aim for a sign-up to trial ratio of above 25\%.
• Achieve a trial to paid ratio of more than 50\%.
OKR 2: Understand what and how our users and non-users think about our product
• Sales team to perform 50 phone interviews with high-value accounts.
• Conduct 50 phone interviews with accounts that are churned now.
• 25 external team leaders (non-users) to be interviewed by product management.
• The design team to conduct 30 sessions of web-based user testing with new and old users.
OKR example 3: Perform user-testing of our product
• Have 25 face-to-face user testing sessions.
• Collect a minimum of 15 video interviews from xyz.com.
OKR example 4: Implement a 360-degree product planning process
• Document a clear role division between sales, marketing, design, and development teams.
• Finalize and document the process of input methods to and from sales, marketing, design, and development back into product management.
• During the product planning and design phase, incorporate user testing into all processes.
• Make user testing a part of the pre-launch testing phase.
OKR example 5: Find out issues with the current user interface
• Perform real-time quality assurance of all features.
• Offer solutions to reduce lag time.
• Identify the areas responsible for product lags.
OKR example 6: Improve product performance by 50\% by Q3
• Eliminate 95\% of the bugs by the end of the quarter.
• Improve performance of the product by incorporating new tools.
• Speed up the product by reducing processing time by at least 40\%.
OKR example 7: Design a new product vision
• Get inputs and feedback from the entire team.
• Get feedback from at least 50\% of the prospective customers.
• Get the highest usability score on UX mockups.
Conclusion
Setting OKRs for project management can help speed up the growth process while driving accountability, collaboration, and transparency between the team members. But OKRs should not be seen as task lists and therefore, you must not expect the perfect execution of OKRs from the first day itself.
Strive for continuous improvement of your OKRs and this will pay off in the long run.
To help you out in setting OKRs for project management, here we shared a few OKR examples and OKR templates for project management that you can use to create OKRs of your own.
In case you are looking for the top OKR software for your business, check out this page.
