Getting started with OKRs

=Introduction= Following Dr. DePasquale reading Steven Levy's new book In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives during the summer of 2011, he decided to institue an OKR-like process into the project management for working on COMTOR. You may be wondering what OKRs are and why you care.

=Definition= OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Originally developed at Intel and widely used at Google, OKRs are goals for the next quarter of a year for each project team. As you'll see below, often individual engineers create their own OKR list as well. While we don't operate on the normal financial quarter system for research purposes, we can safely extend the idea to the academic semester (approximately 15 weeks in length). Here are some additional readings to get you started on understanding the background or OKRs.
 * How Google sets goals and measures success
 * New Year's resolutions & OKRs
 * For CEOs: O.K.R.s for Better Management of Agency New Business
 * OKRs for actually reaching goals

=One Alum's Thoughts= Pondering their use on this project, Dr. DePasquale turned to a recent TCNJ computer science alum, Jake Voytko, who is employed at Google on the Google Docs team (FYI, we're lining up a talk by Jake for the spring '12 semester just following the release of something big he is working on along with his other team members). Jake replied to me saying the following:


 * Yeah, all of the groups at Google do OKRs[0], and a lot of people do individual OKRs. It's pretty simple - at the beginning of a quarter, you pick the most important (not easiest/hardest or most/least interesting, IMPORTANT) things you want to do in the next 3 months. You can do it like this:


 * OBJECTIVE 0: Reduce the bug count of my software.
 * Key result 0: Close all obsolete bugs.
 * Key result 1: Triage all new bugs within 1 day.
 * Key result 2: Assign an owner to every bug.
 * Key result 3: Fix 3 bugs a week.


 * OBJECTIVE 1: Add email handling to my software.
 * Key result 0: Pick an open source library.
 * Key result 1: Produce a release candidate that can read email.
 * Key result 2: Produce a release candidate that can send email.
 * Key result 3: Ship a release with email handling.


 * Things to note: Objectives are fuzzy things you want to do. Key results are either definitely done or definitely not done. Figure out how you want to weight each thing, and set a target. You don't want to get 100% each quarter, or you're setting your targets too low, and you don't want to get 0% each quarter, because you're setting your targets too high. Set stretch goals!


 * If you have no organized system of prioritizing tasks, this will be much better than nothing.


 * [0] http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/01/how-google-sets-goals-and-measures-success.html