OKRs could drive some value BUT in my experience they are hard to maintain and update. Most companies keep their OKRs in huge spreadsheets, some even have
dedicated people to maintain that insanity.
Teams then work with different tools, e.g: Marketing use Trello, Eng use Jira, you name it and now you have to trace back tasks from different tools to some OKRs defined somewhere in the cloud ... good luck with that.
It's nearly impossible to measure and reconcile progress made on team/sprint basis with OKRs therefore you just shovel random numbers in the spreadsheet and management is happy.
When an OKRs is updated good luck cascading the changes bottom <=> up .
I have yet to find a company that has implemented OKRs in an effective way.
Most of the time managers themselves tell you : "just write something .. it does not really matter" hahahah and there you go ... At the end of the day people have
to do OKRs but they keep asking themselves ... why ?
Do you have a companion tool whose purpose is to convince Excel devotees that modern, domain-specific tooling exists, and that they should stop pushing Excel because it's terrible for many tasks?
My problem is less that no tools exist to manage things outside of spreadsheets, but more that older management tends to take the position of "Jira (or whatever) is complicated and I already know Excel, and I'm in charge so we're using whatever doesn't require me to learn something new".
The problem with domain specific tools for project management is that everyone has slightly different goal, priorities and requirements. So you end up with a mess of a tool that barely works (Jira) or one that's missing necessary features. Then someone decides they could do it faster and better in Excel.
Teams then work with different tools, e.g: Marketing use Trello, Eng use Jira, you name it and now you have to trace back tasks from different tools to some OKRs defined somewhere in the cloud ... good luck with that.
It's nearly impossible to measure and reconcile progress made on team/sprint basis with OKRs therefore you just shovel random numbers in the spreadsheet and management is happy.
When an OKRs is updated good luck cascading the changes bottom <=> up .
I have yet to find a company that has implemented OKRs in an effective way.
Most of the time managers themselves tell you : "just write something .. it does not really matter" hahahah and there you go ... At the end of the day people have to do OKRs but they keep asking themselves ... why ?