OKR - Strategy Development and Implementation in an Agile Environment: Introduction to the World's Most Successful Framework for Strategy Execution in the 21st Century

By Martin J. Leopold

What do companies like Google, Uber, Trello, LinkedIN, Huawei, Flixbus or Holiday Check have in common? They all belong to the successful companies that use OKR profitably and for whom OKR makes an important contribution to their corporate success and goal achievement.

OKR is a simple, agile approach to setting and implementing strategies in companies that is optimized for complex market situations. Particular attention is paid to not only transferring goals to individual employees in a goal cascade, but also to supporting teams in achieving goals together in synergy in a much more sustainable and secure way than each employee could do alone.

OKR is a framework that can be used successfully for any size of organization and works optimally with agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, DevOps and the like.

This book concisely and to the point brings the most important information about what OKR is, what advantages and disadvantages it offers, what elements it comprises and how the process model of OKR works. It presents the role of the OKR master and his tasks and shows important aspects for an OKR implementation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9783752663402

Book preview

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CHALLENGES OF A MODERN WORLD

Many companies today still work according to principles and process models from past centuries and with management and organizational approaches from the times of the emperor. In recent years and decades, thousands of companies in Europe have failed with these approaches.

Companies today find themselves in a VUKA world. VUKA stands for volatility (fluctuation, change), uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (ambiguity), which characterize the world today. Fast development cycles are supported by a high degree of mechanization and support through automation and informatics. Today, there is no longer any need to procure the corresponding infrastructure and technology - which for a long time held back smaller companies with fewer financial resources in particular - but instead corresponding services can be obtained from the Internet at attractive and usage-based rates and are thus accessible to providers and market participants almost worldwide.

In today's world, these challenges with long strategy and development cycles and processes that often take from months to years to complete, lead almost immediately to a situation where responsiveness and thus competitiveness are called into question.

In many companies there is a great deal of uncertainty when it comes to developing a strategy that can be implemented in such a rapidly changing world, and often the subsequent implementation in day-to-day business is also a major challenge.

In addition to the strategic and tactical challenges in the current economic environment, communication is also becoming increasingly challenging. This starts with the fact that suppliers are sometimes located in different time zones than their customers, or employees in companies are sometimes located globally, may know different mentalities and languages, or simply have a different use of language and/or different values based on their orientation, education and expertise. If we also take leadership approaches as a starting point, where a leader no longer issues orders and the team implements them, but instead self-organized and self-responsible team structures occur, the internal coordination and communication effort in the teams grows considerably with each additional participant.

A central challenge in today's business world is increasing complexity. When we talk about complexity, it makes sense to first distinguish it from complicatedness, as the two are often used synonymously in everyday life, but in no way are. First, however, we should address the two other types of challenges in everyday business. The division here is based on Dave Snowden's ¹Cynefin framework. We can leave out the other two categories of task requirements, simple (obvious) and chaotic, for this consideration. Simple requirements do not need further discussion and chaotic systems cannot be handled with structured procedures. This leaves us with complicated and complex