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How agile teams make Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) work

Abstract

Today, many companies allow their employees to work from anywhere, which has changed how employees coordinate their work and align toward the same goals. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal-setting framework applied in such distributed settings. This research aimed to investigate how OKRs are used in large-scale agile contexts. We interviewed team members and analyzed documents, including a survey. Our study’s results provide both enabling and limiting situations that make team members’ utilization of the framework either easier or more difficult. We found that OKRs aided knowledge sharing and improved transparency between teams. We present four strategies used for overcoming challenges and maximizing the benefits of using a goal-setting framework. An important takeaway is that companies that employ OKRs must support their employees, especially in defining key outcomes that align and encourage teams toward a common goal.

Category

Academic chapter/article/Conference paper

Client

  • Research Council of Norway (RCN) / 321477

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • University of Oslo
  • SINTEF Digital / Software Engineering, Safety and Security
  • Knowit AS

Year

2022

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Book

ICSSP'22: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software and System Processes and International Conference on Global Software Engineering

ISBN

978-1-4503-9674-5

Page(s)

104 - 209

View this publication at Cristin