OKR or KPI?

• 2020-12-24
• 4:54 pm
• Posted By: Tellusant

OKR or KPI? Not a Hamlet soliloquy, but an important choice for companies.

Objectives and Key Results is common in tech, while Key Performance Indicators is common in consumer goods and other traditional industries.

OKR derives from Intel and became more commonly used when Google started using it. KPI is one aspect of the balanced scorecard of 1990s fame.

They are largely the same thing. They build on the idea of “what gets measured gets done.” And more things than financial outcomes need to be measured.

We give a slight edge to OKR. This is because it ties the measures directly to the objectives and results, and it is to us more active, while KPI can be a passive measure of what has happened.

For both, a negative is that there is often nothing “key” about the measures. Companies tend to throw in any indicator they can think of. It becomes impossible to manage against them because there are too many. An executive can always feel good good about something and highlight it to the higher-ups.

Tellusant’s products, while not dashboards, can easily be linked dynamically to OKR or KPI dashboards if those exist in a robust IT environment.