Why OKRs Go Off Track Before the Quarter Even Starts

Open last quarter’s OKRs and have a look at the ones you missed.

Chances are, the objective itself still sounds perfectly reasonable. Grow revenue from existing clients. Launch a new service. Improve project profitability. Reduce delivery times.

Then look at the details below the surface.

Who had time to do the work? What was the expected delivery date? Where was the progress being tracked?

This is usually where things start to unravel.

We see businesses spend a lot of time refining the wording of their OKRs. They debate whether the target should be 15% or 20%. They cut six objectives down to three. They rewrite them until everyone in the planning meeting agrees they sound achievable.

Far less time goes into checking whether the business can deliver them.

Take a fairly standard objective: launch two new service lines this quarter.

Perhaps your Head of Delivery needs six hours a week to design the service. Marketing needs another four to launch it. Someone in finance needs to work through the pricing. Sales needs training before the launch.

Suddenly the objective comes with 15 or 20 hours of work every week.

Now compare that with what those people are already doing.

If your Head of Delivery is committed to client work for 95% of September, where are those six additional hours every week coming from? 

There also needs to be one person who knows they’re responsible for moving the objective forward and reporting on it regularly. 

Finally, if the key result is that the project margin needs to increase by 5%, how did you get to that number? 

Quarterly planning happens around strategy. The team is discussing where the business needs to go next. Meanwhile, the information needed to decide whether the plan is achievable is scattered. 

Current projects are in the project management system. Annual leave is sitting in the HR tool. Forecast billable work may be in a separate resource planner or finance platform.

Nobody has brought those views into the planning conversation. 

Then Monday morning arrives and they have three client deadlines, an escalation and a team member off sick.

The internal objective moves down the list because client work has a deadline and an invoice attached to it.

By the end of the quarter, the business has missed the key result and the conversation turns to whether OKRs work.

We would ask a different question: did that person ever have the capacity required to deliver it?

When we build capacity views for clients, we often start with very simple bands. 

• Below 75% committed gives you some room. 
• Between 75% and 90% deserves a closer look before adding work. 
• Above 90% means something probably needs to shift first. 

You can test this in your next planning session without changing software or rebuilding your entire operating model.

Take every draft key result and add three lines underneath it.

Capacity: Who needs to work on this, and how much time does it need?

Be specific. “Thomas, six hours a week for eight weeks” gives you something you can test against the existing workload.

Ownership: Who reports on this, and when?

Name one person and a recurring meeting time. If nobody knows when progress will be discussed again, there’s a good chance it will fall behind more urgent work.

Measurement: Where does the number come from?

Take note of the system, report or board they’d open daily or weekly to check progress. 

If the answer involves exporting spreadsheets, copying numbers between systems or asking multiple people for updates, you’ve already found a risk.

You may discover that five different objectives depend on the same two people. Or that someone apparently has 30 hours a week available for strategic work while already being booked on client delivery for 35.

That gives the leadership team something concrete and useful for planning.

The next step is to check your systems. This is where we spend a lot of our time with clients.

A company may already track projects, time, sales and finances. The problem is that each system answers its own question.

If those pieces stay separate, somebody has to pull them together whenever leadership wants an update. 

We start by deciding what the leader needs to know.

For example: Is this objective still achievable this week?

Then we work backwards.

Which projects affect it? How many hours remain? Has the forecast changed? 

Once that data is structured properly and the systems are connected, the weekly update becomes much easier... and more accurate.

Try this before your next quarterly planning session

Choose an objective you’re considering for Q4.

Write down:

1. Who needs to work on it and how many hours it requires.
2. Who will own the weekly update.
3. Exactly where the result will be measured.

Then compare those answers with what is already committed in the business.

You may find that the objective itself is perfectly achievable. You may also find that the people, time or reporting needed to deliver it simply have not been accounted for yet.

Finding that out before the quarter starts is considerably cheaper than explaining a missed target twelve weeks later.

If you have an objective that keeps slipping and cannot see why, book a free 30-minute scoping call with us. Bring the objective and how you currently track it. We’ll work through the capacity, ownership and measurement behind it and show you where we would start.