Objective is the major goal that you want your organization to achieve, the destination at which all your activities will be directed. Your company may be focused on reaching a certain level of profits, or releasing the new product, or improving your customer service. Whatever it is, your Objective should be global, overarching, and not overly-specific.

Key Results are your sub-goals. They are smaller in scale and more specific than Objectives. And most importantly, they must be directly related with the Objective you’ve set at step 1. Key Results show what you must achieve in order to reach your Objective. So, if your organization’s Objective is to launch the new product, examples of company OKRs would be to run a bunch of customer interviews and conduct a training session on the new product for your teams.

With your Objective and Key Results figured out, decide on your Tasks. A Task is an activity required to reach a Key Result. So, like Key Results are always associated with an Objective, every Task needs to be related to a specific Key Result. So, for a Key Result “run x customer interviews”, Tasks would be to decide what information you wish to learn, prepare the relevant interview content, and send interview invites to customers via selected channels.

At this point, you’ve determined your Objective, Key Results, and Tasks. Now it’s time to put all that in place. This is where best OKR software like KeepSolid Goals really shines. You will need proper tools to manage all aspects of your OKR process, for instance: 

• Mind map and timeline to present your whole action plan in a visually clear and informative way
• Sprints and Kanban boards for Agile task management
• Reports to monitor your company’s progress towards your Objective and business performance in general

The market is evershifting, and so you want to keep your business plans flexible and relevant. To keep up with the market, track business trends, take advantage of arising opportunities, and look out for potential problems. Once again, a good OKR app like KeepSolid Goals should come in handy at this step, allowing for convenient and efficient plan management features:

• Updating your Objectives and Key Results from any screen, in a few clicks, with all relevant information available
• Managing your teams, adding new due Tasks and assigning them to relevant team members
• Reviewing and redefining the set KPIs to better fit the shifting market conditions

Normally, you would get to this step after you’ve achieved your Objective. At that point, let’s take a look at your progress so far and see what we can learn from it. Ask yourself the following questions - you will learn valuable lessons for your next project: 

• Have you reached your Objective?
• Have you distributed your resources correctly? 
• What difficulties did you encounter with the Objective, Key Results, Tasks?
• How effective was your team at reaching the Objective and Key Results?