To deliver products raising the value of the companies or to have powerful value propositions of the products, one of the significant tasks is to build the strong, cross funtional and multidisiplinary teams.
These teams help to make the organizations more customer-oriented because of bringing the people with their different perspectives for the common projects. Also, the multidisciplinary teams enable the organizations to provide effective communications and so the teams can predict the values, they will create, at the beginning, thanks to their different points of views and their different areas of expertise.
Taking advantage of this comes with a price. Setting a goal for the cross functional team can be difficult because all team members come from the different departments and with their own priorities.
Using the OKR method for setting goals is like a lifesafer and it works well. Setting the right common goals together with the team makes them more focused and be aware of what kinds of contributions they can do in order to achieve the objectives. Setting goals with the OKR methodology provides transparency, inspiration for the teams, objectivity and timeboxing.
Let me give a little details of these advantages.
Transparency
At the beginning the team knows what they will achieve when they do their jobs. Also, OKRs should be transparent and open to all teams within the organizations, therefore anyone can know, follow and try to do their bests to achieve these objectives. At the same time, even if the one is not within the project team, she/he can contribute to the project because of being aware of the objectives.
Inspiration
Setting the inspiring goals together with the team is very important step for the OKR methodology. The objectives should be impressive and they shouldnot be easy. They encourage the teams to reveal their excellent performances.
Objectivity
The key results should be numeric to make the leaders or teams to understand whether they reach the objectives or not. Being numeric provides the objectivity for all stakeholders.
Timeboxing
The Objectives should have a specific timeplan. The creator of OKR, Andy Groove and the one who name it as OKR, John Doerr recommended that the objectives should be set quarterly. But, they can be set for 4 montly, half yearly or yearly.
To adopt the customer first approach, it is important to build the team that are cross-functional and has a diverse range of expertise. In order to give these team a common direction to raise the value of the products, setting goals with OKR methodology is very powerful tool.
