Introducing forecasting for OKRs
With OKR, understanding what you expect you’re going to achieve is as important as understanding how close you are to achieving it. Forecasting for OKR is a useful process that will help you and your teams decide where to focus next, which increases the chance that you’ll achieve your OKRs. This is why we are introducing OKR confidence levels. Confidence levels enable you to forecast progress.
What is a confidence level?
An OKR confidence level is a simple indicator of whether the person leading that OKR believes that it’s (still) achievable. An OKR is usually considered achieved when you get to at least 70% progress.
There are 3 different confidence levels:
– You’re confident that you will achieve this OKR.
– There is a risk but you still believe you’ll achieve this OKR.
– This OKR is in trouble and probably won’t make it to 70% progress.
Why OKR confidence levels matter
Progress on an OKR is never subjective and always based on quantitative data. Confidence levels, on the other hand, are subjective. They are, therefore, an important measure to forecast progress: if the person leading that Objective loses his confidence, something must be wrong.
If an OKR is tagged at-risk, it means the lead for that OKR lost their confidence that they will achieve that OKR. When this happens we would recommend everyone involved with that OKR sits together to see what can be done to get the OKR back on-track again!
Confidence levels together with progress-over-time give you a broader picture of how well your OKRs are doing and enable everyone to take action when an OKR is off-track.
How to work with OKR confidence levels in Perdoo
In Perdoo, we always show you how a certain Objective and its Key Results have progressed throughout a certain period (e.g. this week or during the past 14 days). We now also show you, in that same view, the confidence level for that OKR.
Every time a confidence level changes it’s added to the Objective timeline, which means you’ll be able to see how confidence levels change over time.
Become better at forecasting progress
Using confidence levels will help OKR leads become better at forecasting progress, and directing the focus of their teams. For instance, if an OKR is tagged on-track but wasn’t achieved, the lead and their team can discuss why they thought they were on track and where it went wrong. This helps everyone become better at forecasting, and better at achieving their OKRs. Forecasting is an important skill: the sooner something is identified as off-track or at-risk, the sooner others are able to step in and help you get that OKR back on track again!
Learn more and get a demo of Perdoo here.
