Guide
OKRs: connecting company objectives to projects
An objective says where you want to go; key results say how you will know you got there. The hard part is what happens when a project serves none.
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. An objective is a qualitative statement of intent — where the organization wants to be — and each objective carries two to five key results, which are measurable outcomes that prove it was reached. “Become the reference for mid-market clients” is an objective; “raise renewal rate from 82% to 90%” is a key result. The pair is deliberately short and public.
A key result is an outcome, not a deliverable
This is where most implementations fail. “Ship the new portal” is not a key result — it is a project, and it can be delivered in full while changing nothing. “Cut time to first quote from 5 days to 2” is a key result: it can only be claimed if reality moved. Listing deliverables under an objective turns OKRs into a project plan with better vocabulary, and the alignment they were supposed to create never happens.
OKRs and KPIs are not competing
A KPI monitors something you run permanently — availability, margin, satisfaction — and you want it stable or improving. An OKR is a deliberate push over a quarter or a year, on something you have decided to change now. A KPI that goes off track becomes an incident; an OKR that goes off track becomes an arbitration. Organizations that merge the two end up with sixty OKRs, which is to say none.
The uncomfortable question they force
The real value of OKRs in a portfolio is not the cascade — it is the audit. Once objectives are written, every running project can be asked which key result it moves. Some answer clearly. Some answer with a deliverable. And some cannot answer at all: those are projects nobody had ever compared to the strategy, and they usually consume a surprising share of capacity. Finding them is the point.
Keeping the count low enough to matter
Three to five objectives per level, two to five key results each, one quarter or one year, reviewed on a fixed rhythm. Beyond that the model collapses under its own weight: teams write OKRs to be seen writing OKRs, nothing is dropped, and the exercise becomes a reporting tax. A short list that genuinely arbitrates beats a complete one nobody reads.
OKRs and the portfolio in FoxPlan
FoxPlan carries a tree of strategic objectives with weighted links to the projects that serve them, so a portfolio can be read from the objective down — what contributes to it, at what cost, for what capacity — and from the project up: which objective justifies it. The projects that turn out to hang from nothing become visible, which is exactly the conversation an OKR cycle is supposed to produce.
