How can you use OKRs to your advantage? Learn how to make your strategic plans transparent to everyone, prioritize work more efficiently and track key results with the help of OKR tools.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) help you set goals and track their execution. While the Objective serves as an ambitious statement of our goal, the Key Results serve as metrics that track how we are doing toward achieving it.
How to write an OKR - formula
Here’s an example:
Objective: Achieve financial stability by driving revenues. Key Result 1: Increase annual subscriptions from 50% to 70%. Key Result 2: Double the newly–added subscriptions to second-tier contracts. Key Result 3: Grow renewal rate from 55% to 75%.
An OKR software can help you visualize your organizational or team goal and its key results while tracking their progress. Modern OKR tools unlock company-wide transparency into strategic plans and align them with execution.
What Are the OKR Software Key Characteristics?
The three key attributes of good OKR software include enabling alignment with strategic plans, tracking key results, and measuring progress toward goals. Let’s discover more.
Enable Alignment with the Strategic Plans
One of the key characteristics of the OKR goal-setting framework is the premise for a company-wide alignment of all efforts towards the same goals. With transparent goals reaching every team member, OKRs manage to spread the company’s strategic direction, incite proactive discussions, and drive employee engagement.
The OKR platform you choose should be apt to clearly visualize the key OKR attributes such as owner, time frame, objective, key results, progress indication, and make these available to every company member.
Visualizing work alignment across different organizational levels
Manage OKR Dependencies & Shared Goals
Dependencies and shared goals are part of the OKR framework. The transparency of OKR tools should show the organizational direction and how to get there through specific key results. For instance, the progress of the key results can be driven by the progress of various team initiatives or work items.
A good OKR software should allow you to establish dependencies between objectives (shared OKRs). For example, a team may have set 3 quarterly objectives whose execution needs to happen consecutively, or they depend on the OKRs of another team/business area within the company. It's important to visualize those connections to keep all stakeholders on the same page.
Create Review Opportunities
Objectives and key results enable focusing on what’s most important for your business. To address prioritization and achieve focused work, the framework promotes goals’ evaluation and encourages feedback.
Modern OKR platforms facilitate such evaluation through various customizable individual, team, or departmental reviews. Furthermore, OKR tooling systems provide multiple ways to submit feedback, comments, or reflections that can be addressed during meetings and discussions.
Measure The Progress of Key Results
A cornerstone of the success of OKRs is measuring how you achieve the goals your team has set. Tracking the progress of your team goals shows if they are staying on track, including the ones falling behind.
Advanced OKR tools introduce functionalities such as score completion to indicate the progress of goals and real-time calculation of the results. Through visualization of goal completion, status messages, alerts, or automated notifications, OKR tools offer inventive ways to demonstrate how things are moving forward.
10 Best OKR Software
Needless to say, OKR software as a service solution (SaaS) is the fundamental trait of each modern OKR tool. Secured access from any remote location and instant updates are no longer enough. Outstanding OKR solutions provide enhanced visualizations, wide customization options, advanced OKRs tracking, analytics, integrations, and more.
Let’s look at the best 10 OKR software that are worth exploring.
1. Kanbanize
Kanbanize is a Lean/Agile work management platform that can help you visualize objectives and key results on a shared Kanban board to achieve greater alignment between strategy and execution. In Kanbanize, this happens by creating your high-level company or team goals as Initiatives and setting their key results to pursue as Outcomes.
Visualization of key results’ progress using Outcomes in Kanbanize
With Kanbanize, you can achieve transparency between goals, outcomes and specific work items contributing to the progress of each objective, visualize the dependencies between various teams and track all progress in a single place.
Visualize different outcome scenarios based on your goals
Trends graph to measure the progress of key results
Ability to add, edit, or delete historical data
Colored indicators of progress
2. Quantive
The orchestration system that Quantive has to offer includes employee success and OKR management features. The easy-to-use graphic interface with drag-and-drop functionality makes setting and connecting objectives and key results straightforward. The software allows you to set parent and child OKRs, and track their progress on your Home screen in real time.Features
Drag and drop alignment view of the OKR hierarchy structure
Multiple reports – Insightboards
3. Perdoo
Perdoo’s goal management tool allows you to connect OKRs and KPIs in one place. Using an OKR roadmap, you can visualize how different levels of OKRs connect to each other. The software offers a view of the historical performance of company goals using strategic timelines and various reports.Features
OKR Roadmap
Weekly progress reports
Private OKRs and KPIs
Growth board
Data export and import
4. Weekdone
Weekdone OKR software puts results on display for the company. Thanks to visual dashboards, graphs, and views – leaders and employees always have eyes on the most important KPIs, metrics, trackable activities and weekly plans. Weekdone supports cross-team collaboration with open Newsfeed, OKR tracking, project updates, public feedback and praise to anyone in the company. Stay connected and encourage everyone to work toward company goals.Features
OKR hierarchy & company-wide linking
Color-coded OKR and KPI progress dashboards
Openly shared OKRs, Initiatives, and Weekly Plans
Newsfeed to follow updates
Automated weekly progress reports
Public feedback and praise
Team training and OKR coaching (included in cost)
5. Koan
Koan’s OKR platform offers straightforward visualization of measurable team goals. The software includes basic but fundamental functionalities, including real-time status updates, reflection insights, and feedback aiming to boost team alignment and collaboration.
Features
Personal OKR and tracking of goals
Company OKR dashboard
Tracking OKRs of multiple teams
OKR data export
6. Leapsome
Leapsome’s goals management solution allows you to visualize strategic plans and track their execution regardless of the goal-setting model you use. Leapsome creates a structure for your personal, team, or organizational goals visualizing ownership and internal dependencies.
Features
Progress Timelines
Automatic progress updates
Feedback and praise opportunities
Activity feed
Goal analytics
7. ClickUp
A work management and OKR solution, ClickUp simplifies the organization of work and goals. Thanks to its board view feature, you can visualize the progress of each task in your workflow. Furthermore, you can create personal goals and targets to align with your company’s goals.
Features
Customizable Goals and Targets
Progress tracking
Goals Folders
Weekly Scorecards
8. Profit.co
Profit is a software solution that supports strategy execution through OKRs, task, and performance management. The goal-setting software uses a cascading style of objectives and key results visualization to help align everyone with the company goals. You can choose between different types of key results to indicate their completion more accurately. The software offers real-time insights into goals’ completion and performance at every organizational level.
Features
Different types of key results
Filtering and export functionalities
Aligning multiple OKRs and connecting individual tasks to key results
Comments, mentions, tags, status
Automated reminders
9. Asana
Asana is a project management tool that allows you to organize your tasks, view them differently, automate tasks, and integrate with a number of other software programs. The OKR solution allows you to connect your work to your company goals in one place to monitor progress and keep everyone on track.
Features
Goals and sub-goals
Portfolio management
Templates for company and team goals
Integrations with Salesforce, Tableau, Power BI
10. 15Five
15five’s performance management and employee engagement solution allows you to focus on what matters with OKRs. You can set and track your objectives and share them with everyone across the organization.
Features
Company-wide, departmental and personal OKRs
Requesting feedback
Weekly Check-Ins
1-on-1 goal reviews
Regardless of your company, project, or team size, an OKR dashboard can help you share your plans and priorities. A well-designed OKR system can make all the difference by aligning everyone on the big picture and the overall direction your organization wants to take.
How to Choose the Right OKR Tool?
When choosing an OKR tooling, you should get buy-in from the majority and adhere to the chosen platform on all levels. Here's an overview of the capabilities an OKR solution should provide you with.
Step 1: Set and visualize all OKRs.
Step 2: Ensure that OKRs are linked across teams and departments in the company.
Step 3: Monitor and track OKRs on the same platform.
Step 4: Select cadences frequency for goals evaluation on each organizational level.
Step 5: Review and assess OKRs based on analytics and reports available in the OKR software.
In Summary
Today’s OKR tools offer visualization of team, organizational, or individual goals and key results, as well as monitoring and tracking their progress. The list of key characteristics of OKR software includes:
Visualization of objectives and key results
Visualizing dependencies between objectives, across teams or functions
Monitoring and measuring the progress of objectives and key results in real-time
How to write an OKR - formula
Visualizing work alignment across different organizational levels
Visualization of key results’ progress using Outcomes in Kanbanize
Features
Features
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