The Value of OKRs and How Time Tracker Work Software Can Help You Measure Them

Often times, business development and success is all about planning. To this end, many strategies and business plans have been created over the years. One such management strategy is OKR.

In this article, we’ll go over what OKR is and why it’s so popular but we’ll also offer you some guidelines on how you can implement it and make it successful with the help of a time tracker work tool.

A Brief History and Outline of OKR Strategy

OKR (which stands for Objectives and Key Results) is a business management and goal setting strategy created and first implemented by Intel several decades ago but is now used as an underlying management method in many hugely successful global companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Zynga and Twitter.

OKR model includes two layers of goal setting. The first part is defining Objectives. These are supposed to be a couple of broadly stated, ambitious goals whose accomplishment would significantly contribute to your business success. The next step is defining Key Results for each of your Objectives. These Results should be a roadmap to how you plan on achieving the Objectives and they should, therefore, be measurable (preferably numerically defined) and achievable but not easy. In fact, the standard model suggests that you shouldn’t expect a success outcome of more that 75% as that would suggest that your Objectives aren’t ambitious enough.

These OKRs should be reviewed, revised and possibly redefined at least on a quarterly basis and they should also be public so that everyone in the company can access and work towards them. This way, everyone is on the same page regarding your business goals.

How Does Time Tracker Work App Factor Into This Model?

The key role of time tracking company solution within the OKR business strategy is the fact that it provides a lot of very useful time tracker work data that can help you quantify your Key Results, which are, as you can recall, typically based on concrete numerical metrics. If you are using Vivify scrum software, or jira which already have OKRs set within the system – it is probably the best to use their time traker. 

There are quite a few things that a software clock system can track and measure, including time on specific tasks, total time on projects, how long your team spends on non-billable activities, a daily amount of time they spend actively working, etc. The metrics don’t even necessarily have to be time-based – time tracker work software can also help you estimate your project budget or even productivity if it’s used alongside an employee monitoring solution.

How this can help your OKR strategy can best be illustrated with an example.

In a lot of cases, the direction that you want to take your company in is towards growth and development and OKRs are a good strategy to map this out consistently. So let’s say that one of your Objectives is to increase the efficiency on projects so that you can take on more clients.

In pursuit of this goal, you might set one of your Key Results to be to decrease non-billable hours by 15%. Staff time tracking software can be a great tool to track this metric and see your progress. You can pinpoint the activities that take up the most time and brainstorm some ways to make them more efficient. After that, you can use the software to follow your progress and calculate exactly how much of your target you’ve managed to achieve.

Another example of your Key Result could be increasing the time spent on project-related tasks by 30 minutes per day. The best time tracking solution will map out your team’s productivity and you’ll be able to detect weaknesses that you can work on. Again, tracking your progress is easy so you’ll be able to know how successful your efforts are.

Conclusion

As we have seen, time tracker work software can prove to be an excellent tool that compliments OKR management strategy. The ease of use, automaticity, reliability and accuracy of its data all go towards measuring your Key Results and giving you the necessary specifics to determine whether and to what extent you team is successful in reaching the set Objectives.