The Better Business Analysis Institute presence, the Better Business Analysis podcast with Benjamin Walsh. Hi. Everybody and welcome. Back to the better. Business Analysis. Podcast with. Benjamin Walsh and we are going to continue on our BA. Bytes series. Today, we're going to be talking. About OK Rs. Objectives and. Key result areas. OK, we're going to talk about how BA's can use them, why they kind of are a. Parallel. Business measurement tool,
that's really important. When we focus down. On the projects. The objectives, the epic, the. User stories. The business. As a whole, our framework teams. Generally will. Have OK Rs. OK. And we need to talk about what they are, why they're important to business and how. You can play a crucial role in terms of. Defining them. OK, So what actually? Are OK ours? A guy named Andy Grove. He was the legendary CEO. Of Intel. Was first credited with. Kind of making the. Concept of.
Objectives and. Key results. OK, Rs. Very popular, but there were other. Frameworks that existed before his time, however OK Rs were introduced to address. A critical. Challenge faced specifically by Intel at the time, but other organizations like Google. Experienced this later, which was. Around aligning individual and team goals. With the overall company objectives. So this. Is quite interesting, right? Because we talk about. Projects and. Products. And how?
Those epics, themes, the bits. That we're. Doing need to align. With strategic objectives. Well, this is exactly the same, but you can. See it as a parallel branch. While. We're working in a project Change Space BA's. Most of the time teams and individuals actually have these kind of K. PIS, if you like, you probably heard the term KPI and we'll talk about how that.
Links in a minute. But. They're like personal goals to make sure that they are aligned and they know what they're doing and this. Can relate to their pay, it can relate to company results, and it's really an. Operational Framework. For. Strategic planning all the way down to. Strategic execution before OK Rs. Companies often. Struggled with a lack of focus. And that was like employers. Just weren't. Clear about what mattered the most. They just weren't given.
They knew the vision, maybe they even had good values, they may even had good culture, but they really needed to know what was the most important things to focus on. There was a. Misalignment between individual and team goals, so they didn't really contribute effectively to the company. 'S vision success objectives. And there definitely was ineffective measurement. So progress towards those goals. Were very. Difficult to. Track and measure OK.
And that's the one area that I think these this tool is particularly good at is showing how. You can measure all the way through. So OK. Ours. Provide a. Structured approach. To. Define clear and ambitious goals, objectives. Set their. Direction SO. That's exactly what we use it. For. In a project product. Space. It helped Does measure progress key results? Quantify those objectives. So they. Make them. Miserable, and then it provides alignment.
With. You know, teams and individuals, they actually understand, you know? Tom on the tools. Understands how. His job contributes to the bigger picture, so OK, Rs have really proven to be a valuable tool. For countless organizations now. Across various industries. When it comes. To implementing. Strategy effectively. It. Allows us to have. A communication, A check. In point. Increased accountability. Decision making. Usually you'll see an. Increase in. Performance, improved alignment
and. Focus. That's why we've introduced OK. Rs and I'm just. Going to premise this and say. Look, the leadership team has to be committed. There has to be clear. Communication, you have to have reviews, you have to have a balance between ambition and achievement. They're they're different by the way. And so all those things have to be true for OK Rs to really work. It's not a perfect solution. But it's pretty damn good. What about BAS? How do? We play into this.
World of OK Rs. Really. We. Can help? We have the same skills. In terms of we break things down. To achieve we can help breakdown OK ours into the. Objectives which we would may already have. Around our. Project space to be. Organizational wide strategic objectives. And then the key. Results. Under that. So the objectives are being what? Specific significant time bound SMART goals to achieve something. And then the key results are how? The measurable.
Outcomes that indicate. You've achieved that objective. OK. And they're time bound and. Verifiable. And now given and. Allocated to. Different. Teams so. Imagine you had five. Different. Business units. Under the C-Suite, the C-Suite would sit the objectives based. On the board direction. Probably if there is a board. And then these five teams would either have. One or a series of key results. Now those key results could be.
At the executive. Level which are shared responsibility, but you generally go. Breakdown key results to key result areas which are like groupings like. Themes and then you can it allows. You so they're called KR. A's key result areas. And then of course you can link those down to individual. KPI's. To the team and then the individual. And there are great tools for visualizing this. You really need visual cues. For this, it's hard to do in Excel, it's hard to do in DevOps, it's.
Hard to. Do in. Jira so you can. Make these. Very visible. Very very similar to our objectives. Down to epochs, but these are. Something that are locked. Into your one-on-one catch ups. With your manager and they should be checked in on. It on a regular basis. So that's a brief overview of. OK, Rs objectives. Key results. There is lots and lots of material about this. Online I suggest if you don't completely understand. What I've just said. Read a book about it.
Start. Using it start. Helping out as a BA, you'll add huge value. To your. Organization.