Finalizing Objectives

You have completed your assessment and design, and finally have the information you need to start creating and deploying your initiative. The initiative should be gaining momentum as your targets become clearer, and people may have begun to rally in support of it. It can be tempting to rush in and start building, but what happens if you build the wrong thing? Or you build the right thing (or a right thing), but it’s not what people expected? It is time to set, or reset, your initiative’s objectives to make sure that does not happen. This chapter discusses the need for, and value of, setting explicit objectives as you build your initiative. It introduces Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a simple and effective way to establish and capture goals and ensure the actions you are taking are achieving those goals. It also introduces the benefits of having a common cadence and the need for alignment and buy-in; and includes a simple tool for analyzing and managing stakeholder relationships.