Cycle Steering - Draft Phase

What to expect

In the Draft Phase, you will learn more about your organization’s performance and impediments during the drafting phase of the OKR cycle. You are able to see at a glance which teams need support with OKR drafting and get an impression of the current OKR quality. 

 

Why use it

In this overview, you will get deep insights into the status of the drafting phase and the quality of OKRs in the organization. Whether teams are, for example, not defining OKRs at all, not defining metric Key Results, or do not set any OKRs into active status, you will learn about all of it in this section. It will provide you with the information you need to support teams in defining their OKRs properly and setting a good foundation for the whole OKR cycle.

 

When to use

As a Program Lead or Coach, you may start using the Draft Overview as soon as the organization has started with the drafting for the new cycle. Remember that this should happen at least one month before the start of the new cycle. Have a look at this section of the report at least once per week to check the progress of the drafting and contact the Team Leads and/or Coaches where their teams are behind schedule.

The most important parameters in order to ensure a perfect set-up for the strategy execution consist of  the following questions that are answered with either “yes” or “no”:

• Does the team have defined Objectives?
• Does the Objective have less than 150 characters to be concise enough?
• Do those Objectives have an appropriate number of Key Results?
• Do all Objectives have metric Key Results?
• Do all Key Results have an Owner?
• Have all OKRs been activated?

In the beginning, we recommend focusing on two quality criteria: All teams should have defined OKRs and all the Objectives should have an appropriate number of Key Results defined. We recommend contacting the Team Leads or Coaches of the teams that need some support.

This section can be filtered by cycle, team name, 3 hierarchy levels, labels and/or coaches. You can click on any metric to get a detailed view of the teams or OKRs that do not meet the displayed parameter. The color coding is based on the recommended value the organization should have based on best practices. When you hover over the number, you will see the legend for the color coding of each metric. Once a metric is in the orange or red range, a speech bubble will pop up with a recommendation.

The information button "i" explains in detail how each metric is being calculated:

Drafting Score & underneath parameters:

All below metrics are considered in the calculation of draft score. When one selects team name "Organization" then "Teams with OKRs" does not apply.

• Teams with OKRs: From all the teams, total teams with at least one OKR.
• OKRs with less than 150 characters: From all the OKRs, total OKRs with less than 150 characters.
• OKRs with 2-5 Key Results: From all the OKRs, total OKRs with 2-5 key results.
• Metric Key Results: From all the key results, total KRs with metric type.
• Key Results with Owner: From all the key results, total KRs with Owners defined (either team or person).
• Active OKRs: From all the OKRs, the total OKRs activated for the cycle.

Further Drafting Details:

• OKRs with Initiatives: From all the OKRs, total OKRs with at least one initiative.
• Teams with KPIs: From all the teams, total teams with at least one KPI.
• OKRs with at least 1 Jira issue/epic connected: From all the OKRs, total OKRs with at least one Jira issue/epic connected.
• Teams with 1-3 OKRs: From all the teams, total teams with OKRs between 1 to 3.
• OKRs with all tags (Customer, Value and Future State): From all the OKRs, total OKRs with all tags defined(either Customer or Value and Future State).
• OKRs with Promise defined: From all the OKRs, total OKRs with at least one Promise tag defined.

Team Distribution:

This overview shows you a treemap with all teams from the first two hierarchy levels and the corresponding Drafting Score. So you can see at a glance which teams need additional support (red or orange). You can also click on a specific team to see the teams below it and their Drafting Score.

Flexibility with Draft Score Parameters:

We have introduced greater flexibility with the parameters of the scores, allowing for customised and tailored reporting based on specific requirements. For  Draft phase, user now has the flexibility to exclude certain metric from the calculation of Average Draft Score.

Team Quality Checker:

When entering the view "Team Quality Checker" you will get the overall quality of the OKRs per team. You can see per team which of the parameters of the Drafting Score have been fulfilled.

📋 OKR Audit Log

The OKR Audit Log lets you track changes made to OKRs after they have been activated. This is useful when you want to understand who edited an OKR, what exactly changed, and when it happened.

You can access the Audit Log directly from within the Draft Phase report:

1. Open the Active OKR Metric Detail Page by clicking on any metric in the Draft section.
2. In the top-right corner, click OKR Audit Log.
3. A list will appear showing all OKRs that were modified after activation, including which team's OKR was changed, what was modified, when the change occurred, and the old and new values.