if I never hear "OKR" again I'll be a happy man.
The OKR vs KPI showdown In a series of mandatory high burn rate meetings two leansixsigma blackbelts, keepers of secret knowledge from Japan and ancient wisdom from Illinois, fight to the bitter end* attacking and blocking with statistics beyond any comprehension which haven't been applied correctly since that one guy left. * in the end we're saddled with both
One of the awesome things about the CNC program I took is they relied heavily on this distance learning thing from the SME. Machinists tend to be not-well-educated and have a real cargo-cult understanding of engineers, so they think "manucturing engineers" are actual authorities rather than the dipshits whose grades weren't good enough to get into a real engineering program. Anyway, these SME dipshits and their distance learning program, which I was required to suck down 40 hours of, had things like "if you multiply the sides of a right angle by themselves and then divide that by itself you'll know how long the other side is" to avoid using the word "hypotenuse" or "square root" in the math section, shit like this in some goddamn section... Well... I want you to imagine how they dealt with Six Sigma, Kanban, ISO9001, lean manufacturing and all the rest. It was like this, but not funny and not self-aware.
That sounds painful. I've mostly had to deal with vocabulary-only versions of these from an engineering manager who never had enough buy in from other departments to make major changes.
Literally going into a meeting in 2 minutes to set my OKRs... despite the fact that I am an independent contributor, have no team, no direct reports, a manager in-name-only, and my schedule and workload is dictated by outside sources (customers issuing RFPs). Every factor of the O, the K, and the R, are unmappable and unmeasurable for someone in my role/position. But I've been doing it every quarter for seven years now. Joy.
Just hearing about it now, which means my boss will start her next team meeting waxing lyrical on it's effectiveness. Then we can touch base with HR and loop in finance, so moving forward everyone is aligned and able to leverage synergies and streamline processes, all to empower our core competencies.