Kanban Board OKR Template

OKRs are the hot trend nowadays and one of the top picks when trying to align key business goals across organizations and individuals. In this post, we will define the basics of OKRs as well as showcase how to create your own Kanban board OKR template and merge the two approaches together.

What is OKR?

Objective Key Result (OKR) is a goal-setting and defining framework. It was created in Intel and evangelized by Andy Grove in his book “High Output Management”.

While OKR is a single term, it talks about two separate things – Objective and Key Result.

Objective – is a description of a goal to be achieved in the future. To achieve this goal, each objective consists of 3 to 5 Key Results.

Key Result – is a metric that measures progress towards an objective. It has a starting value that the company or a team is currently at and a target value that the team needs to come up to for reaching the goal.

OKR best practices and OKR example

If this is your first time hearing about OKR, this may be a little confusing. But there are really only a few things you should know about the OKR format. The objective is simply a goal you want to reach and the Key result is a metric used to measure if that goal has been met. Each objective usually consists of 3-5 Key results, that are defined in percentages or any other numerical unit (euros, items, etc.).

When reaching the goal, the target success rate should be around 70%. If the team does better that is great, but if they constantly reach 100% without any major issues, the OKR should be reevaluated.

Here is a couple of example OKRs for illustration.

OKRs examples

Objective 1 – Succesfully launch version 2.0 of our product.

Key results

1 – Get 10k new customers.

2 – Have the product reviewed in 30 publications.

3 – Increase the trial to sign up ratio up to 20%.

Objective 2 – Increase team capabilities by improving talent acquisition.

Key results

1 -Increase the percent of hiring by referrals to 5%.

2 – Diversify hiring platforms – use at least 4 different sites for each position.

3 – Reduce the average time to hire from 50 to 30 days.

4 – Increase the team member participation in the hiring process by 30%.

OKR templates

Learning by doing is one of the most effective ways to start practicing something new. Thus, we have prepared a couple of OKR templates for you to try out and adapt to your process.

OKR Excel template

Excel is one of the most used tools in the project management field. Thus, it comes as no surprise that many teams use it to track their OKRs. Below is a template designed by us to help you manage and track OKRs.

Using this OKR Excel template you will be able to enter your team’s Objectives and track the completion percentage through the Key Results.

Each Objective has a dedicated block with up to 5 Key Results. You can enter the Name of the Objective and track its completion percentage.

The Key Results are written underneath their corresponding Objective. Each of them has a separate completion percentage slot to ensure accurate individual tracking.

This OKR Excel template allows you to track your team’s OKRs and ensure the required results are delivered on time.

Kanban board OKR templates

Kanban board is a tool that helps teams visualize their process and better understand what is going on in their projects at all times. However, this visualization technique can be similarly used for an OKR template. And this is exactly what Teamhood offers.

Our Kanban Board OKR template uses Kanban swimlanes (rows) to display objectives and columns to display and track the key results.

The objective is written as the row title and you can assign a specific deadline for each row to mark when it has to be achieved. In this OKR template, each objective is visualized as a separate row and displayed one after another. Thus, seeing deadlines for each can help you make sure they are both challenging and reachable for your team.

The Kanban board OKR template visualizes key results as tasks on a Kanban board. The first column of the board acts as a list holding everything that has to be done. While the following columns allow tracking the progress of each Key result. The progress steps can differ based on your process, but we recommend starting with something simple. Thus, Teamhood Kanban board OKR templates consist of three steps – Key Results (not started), KR In Progress, and KR Completed.

Kanban board OKRs template

Compare the best kanban board software side by side.

Kanban board OKR template in Teamhood

Curious to see how such an OKR template is implemented in Teamhood? Look at the image below.

The Objectives are visualized as rows with begging and end dates suggesting when the goal has to be reached. Under the objective, there is a percentage showing how many of the goal key results are already completed and how many are yet left to do.

The key results are visualized as work items. The great thing here is that they can be additionally described, have separate deadlines, and be assigned to specific team members. You can even divide them into smaller sub-tasks to be completed.

Lastly, the Teamhood OKR template uses columns to track the progress of key results. The Input column holds the key results that are not yet started, In progress column holds the key results that the team is actively working on, and the Output column shows which of the key results have been achieved. You also have an option of dividing the Output column into two and tracking which key results have met the minimum percentage required to pass and which have exceeded this percentage altogether.

Example of such Kanban Board OKRs implemented in Teamhood tool:

The best part of Kanban Board OKR template is that you can use new techniques with your Kanban Board which is also being used for project management and task management.

OKR Dashboard in Teamhood

Moreover, by using Teamhood to track OKRs you can use the automated Dashboards to easily check on progress. Set up a separate dashboard to quickly check how many of the OKRs have been delivered. What is the progress of each individual objective and what Key Results the team is working on at the moment?

These automated reports will allow you to quickly analyze the current status and report it upwards.

What is Teamhood?

Teamhood is a work collaboration platform for team task management and project management. Modern features combined with time-proven kanban system work magic on your projects and team collaboration.