5 Reports Your Stakeholders Need to Meet OKRs

As much as 60% of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are set from the bottom up, often leaving alignment with organizational goals for later. This can lead to painful inefficiency and poor planning. To help alleviate the pain, consider providing stakeholders these five reports. They will help you think about the organizational goals early, as well as provide greater organizational transparency.

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Strategic Roadmap

This roadmap provides stakeholders outside of engineering a high-level view of what features are planned and when. It visually communicates the cross-organization work being done and when. It works best when divided between three key phases: planning, process, and review. CIOs, CTOs, and CMOs can use this style of a roadmap to ensure planning aligns with their organization’s objectives, as well as best practices for overall process improvement.

Cumulative Flow

The cumulative flow reports show the status of tasks across all your dev teams over some time. It visualizes how many tasks are passing through each phase of an initiative. This helps you see which phases accumulate more tasks than others, and identify bottlenecks in both the team and organization workflow.

Velocity Report

For agile teams, carefully planning that accounts for capacity are key for delivering on time. A velocity report gives stakeholders a single view into a team’s velocity, allowing work to be allocated and timelines to be set.

Risk Matrix

As your projects progress over time you will note that some tasks are of particular attention. This might be because they are known for generating more bugs than others, or simply due to their strategic importance to the organization. Sometimes this is noted on sticky notes in conference rooms where a single team meets. This report aims to elevate these sticky notes to a report visible across teams, so pro-active action can be taken earlier in the projects cycle.

Issue Dependency

This is the most granular report of the list, but it can be very powerful. It allows you to visualize how individual tasks impact other tasks, helping your teams see where the critical path lies. It aims to identify and eliminate a single task from knocking an entire project off schedule.

Regardless of where you are in your adoption of OKRs across your organization, these reports can help maximize the efforts and provide cross-team transparency.

Further Reading

The Overall Retrospective for a Team and Stakeholders

The Meta-Retrospective: How To Get Customers and Stakeholders Onboard