Creating and monitoring objectives

Most popular in leadership and management, OKRs, or Objective and Key Results, are a collaborative method for setting challenging and ambitious goals with measurable results.

Goals are a great way to track improvement in a situation or context while segmenting that improvement with achieving key performance indicators.

Recently, we introduced our brand new Summary page, your first stop on Axify to stay on top of the most significant variations in a given project. In addition, this new page allowed us to set the table for another feature that would help development teams stay on track with continuous improvement: objectives!

Who needs software delivery performance objectives?

Goals are a great way to track improvement in a situation or context while segmenting that improvement with achieving key performance indicators. These objectives then become our North Star and keep us aligned as a team, so everyone works to achieve them.

Generally, we define a goal by an inspiring and evocative name, and it is time-bound. However, since an objective can easily be large and ambitious, it can be interesting to break it down into smaller steps that make it easier to reach an overall goal. These are the key results!

Just as breaking down your stories allows you to deliver value more quickly and continuously through smaller increments, setting achievable goals in the short or long term supports continuous improvement.

Are you familiar with OKRs?

Most popular in leadership and management, OKRs, or Objective and Key Results, are a collaborative method for setting challenging and ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs help track progress, create alignment and encourage commitment around quantifiable goals. We typically write OKRs with one goal at the top, and three to five key results below.

As you may have guessed, you can now set inspiring objectives and target key performance indicators to track their progress, along with the desired percentage of improvement for each.

Objectives

A goal is simply what we need to achieve. It is meant to be meaningful, concrete, action-oriented and inspiring.

Key results

Key results allow us to assess and monitor how well we progress towards achieving a goal. Effective key results are specific and time-bound, aggressive, yet realistic. Most importantly, they are measurable and verifiable. You either meet the requirements of a key result, or you don't; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.

While an objective may have a long shelf life, and we might renew it for a year or more, key results evolve as work progresses. Once they are all completed, we achieved the goal.

Where does Axify fit in?

As you may have guessed, you can now set inspiring objectives and target key performance indicators to track their progress, along with the desired percentage of improvement for each. This can be Axify data (such as flow or DORA metrics) or custom external data (such as NPS score or user numbers).

This way, you will benefit from more insight when correlating specific data while retaining all the flexibility offered by the platform's various axes and key performance indicators to investigate as needed. In addition, of course, you can track several objectives' progress to better understand your work towards improvement.

This new feature is available directly on the Summary page for better visibility and tracking of continuous improvement in the team.

Axify tip

Track your objectives as a team during Scrum, retro or reviews to discuss as a team how to improve!