OKR Champion is an exciting new facilitator role in agile environments. Having internal OKR Champions ensures that your change into an result-oriented and measurable organisation is widely implemented in your company.
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What are OKR Champions and what are their roles?
OKR (Objectives & Key Results) Champions are normally internally team members who support to coordinate, facilitate and follow-up on the OKR implementation process.
We suggest following profile:
Manager or Senior Team Member
Minimum 6 months in the Organization
Overall business savvy and has cross-functional understanding
Possible Scrum Master, Project skills or Project Management background
Communication, training & facilitation skills
An OKR Champion is a facilitator that understands the ins and outs of OKRs and can support their optimal adoption within a company. OKR champions help with the successful rollout, adoption, and use of OKRs within a company to drive the continues tracking on the business goals.
OKR Champions are a critical part of the change process leading to successful OKR adoption and the achievement of positive business results. They will play an ambassador role to OKR implementation by facilitating and providing help to everybody with advice or feedback.
How can we train and leverage OKR Champions in my organizations
Ideally future OKR Champions have already experience with OKR or any other Goal Setting and Achievement process and are at least OKR Pilot Roll-out participations for one or two quarters. (see here a typical pilot roll-out through OKR Asia consulting support)
After their pilot experience we would ask the organisation to run an application or nomination process to select suitable OKR Champions based on the criterias in previous chapter. The selected candidates will receive a more advanced OKR Training to be able to:
Facilitate Strategy workshops to derive yearly targets and quarterly priorities out of the strategy
Set-up a OKR roll-out and communication planning to organize and facilitate the goal setting and achieving on different levels of the company
Be able to host OKR Trainings for new joiners or refresher trainings
Facilitate OKR Workshops with an example agenda to let every leadership or team member participate and align on the company / department / team or project OKRs
Be able to review OKR Set-ups and push the organisation more on outcome Key Results rather than work progress ones.
Can measure operational work and project planning and outcomes to OKRs
Understand which Bonus & Award Systems work well with OKRs
Has basic knowledge of facilitation and change management methods and skills
Certified OKR Champion
This course can be taken as an 8 hours inhouse course with an instructor at your organisation with online test and certification
or as a complete online training certification course on OKRChamp.com
Why are OKR Champions so crucial for an Agile Business Transformation?
OKR Champions make sure that each team/ project or business unit has an OKR ambassador close to them to address their questions or issues and are positive role models.
1.Improve adoption and buy-in from team members:
Change management mostly comes with challenges. For example, we might face some misunderstanding or insecurity from the employees when they are facing the changes. By becoming OKR Champions, we can then support these kinds of challenges and make sure that everyone buy-in to the changes by facilitating them to understand the reasoning behind it.
2.Increase accountability:
Accountability is incredibly important when adopting OKRs. You need somebody to be in charge of facilitating and do the check-ins, OKR Champions will be someone to turn to if the employees have any questions related to OKRs. We will provide support and guidance for everybody to implement OKRs correctly using the best practices of the methodology.
3.In-company support available at all times:
The reality is that our consultant won’t be with us forever. So, a lot of the responsibility of successful OKR implementation relies on the OKR Champions. In addition, it is so much better to have somebody in the company to turn to when you are having trouble setting or tracking your OKRs
OKR Champions, Chief of Staff & PMO positions or further coordinators roles are created in start-ups to align these planning and achievement cycles, read more on our blog "Exciting new roles"
Conclusion
For organizations that attempt to roll out the goal-setting framework without OKR Champions, there is a greater risk that it will not be adopted well or at all. Changing individual and team behaviors to successfully adopt the OKR methodology, like any other change, can stall out without creating new, positive behaviors and habits. The habit that brings the biggest benefit to teams and companies is to start with outcomes first, not activities, and to ensure those outcomes are aligned throughout the company’s top priorities.
For more information how to implement OKRs successfully please contact us on transform@asiapmo.com or on our contact form.
This blog was written by Carsten Ley, Entrepreneur, Enabler & Project Lead in Customer Experience, Project & Business Transformation leading large scale project implementations in Retail, E-commerce, Banking, Consulting & Experience Management for companies like Deloitte Germany, VW Mexico, Rolls-Royce UK, Lazada Vietnam and H&M South East Asia. He founded 2018 Asia PMO, a consulting firm focussing on getting clients fast and efficient into implementation of company objectives, customer & employee experience improvements to foster a result- and team-oriented environment.