It's the start of fiscal year planning for Microsoft and that means budgets, OKRs, and product planning are top of mind in Engineering. We try to infuse OKRs into the culture by:
- Having teams estimate the impact of their Engineering initiatives (e.g. ADO epics) on OKRs during their product planning. This helps give visibility into the engineering investments and how they are expected to impact our OKRs.
- Reviewing OKRs as part of our Monthly Business Reviews.
As we all know, planning and estimation is a non-trivial effort. I find the effort up-front helps to set expectations and tells us if we are on track during our monthly reviews. We bake OKRs into the operating rhythms with templates that include a column for the estimated impact in planning documents. During MBRs, we review OKR status and call-out engineering investments that may be putting a KR at risk.
Speaking of tying initiatives to impact, some of our teams have been using Viva Goals "Projects" ️ entities to track the initiatives explicitly. Have you been tracking your initiatives using Projects? I'm curious if other teams are leveraging the "Projects" in this way.
One thing that I think would be great is if the Viva Goals Projects could have a metric value associated with Key Result. Currently, we have just been including the value in the Title so that it communicates the weighted impact on the KR. Would you find it valuable to have a weight or value associated with the Project entities?