As important as planning and executing your goals, ensuring your team has a way of closing out and reflecting on their OKRs helps to make sure everyone is up-to-date and in sync when it comes to whether they've met their objectives or not.
How to close and score your OKRs
You must close both Objectives and Key Results separately. To close out either, click the three dot menu next to the goal you want to close and click Close out:
From there, you'll bring up the goal scorecard. You'll be able to score your goal based on your ending metric. We use the standard 0.0 to 1.0 rating, where each point represents a percentage that was achieved (if you got to 90% of your goal, you'd rate it a 0.9).
Best practices for closing your OKRs
While just archiving the OKR is a simple way to start over, closing out your OKRs can be a milestone moment, and we believe in making it an event for your team. Having an end of the quarter meeting where each team member reflects on their OKRs, their successes, and the lessons they're learning is a great way of celebrating your team and giving them a chance to come together in the purpose of their work.
One way that we've seen successful customers achieve this is by having every team member go KR by KR, closing and scoring them individually in a team meeting before archiving the objective. Doing this as a group is important to give yourselves time to talk through what went well, what didn't go well, and what can go better next time.
This ceremonial action works as a visual way of working through your teams goals from top to bottom. When the key results have all been discussed and closed, archive the objective or reopen the key results and edit the OKR for the next quarter.
Best practices for scoring key results
Koan uses a 0.0 to 1.0 scale for scoring key results. We crafted the scores for stretch goals, with a 0.7 representing achieving the result, and higher scores showing over achievement.
Scoring key results, much like with tracking your progress, requires quantitative and qualitative information. Start with the quantitative-- how close to achieving your metric were you? If you got 70% of the way towards your goal, start with a 0.7 (this is for stretch goals. With committed OKRs-- goals that your team has promised to hit-- a 1.0 or a 0.0 should be all that you use).
From there, take a look at your progress qualitatively. The number might not show the effort or planning that went into your OKRs, and looking subjectively at your scores is critical to any goal retrospective. For instance, you may have hit over 100% of your metric, but realize that you set a goal that was too easy. This might take your score from a 1.0 to a 0.6-- you hit the right number, but the overall result and opportunity for growth were missed.
On the other hand, you might have missed your metric, but exceeded your expectations. John Doerr in Measure What Matters says:
Say the team's objective is to recruit new customers, and your key result is fifty phone calls. You wind up calling thirty-five prospects, for a raw goal score of 70 percent. Did you succeed or fail? By itself, the data doesn't afford us much insight. But if a dozen of your calls lasted several hours apiece and resulted in eight new customers, you might give yourself a perfect 1.0. Conversely: If you procrastinated, rushed through all fifty calls, and signed only one new customer, you might assess your performance at 0.25–because you could have pushed harder. (And on reflection: Should the key result have prioritized new customers, rather than calls?)
Archiving your OKRs
Closed OKRs will stay visible to your team, but they will have the "Closed" tag and final score visible and members will no longer be prompted to update them in their Reflections. If you'd prefer to completely remove closed OKRs from view, you can archive them. To archive the OKR, click on the three dots menu at the top right:
From that menu, you can archive the objective and all of its downstream key results by selecting Archive Objective.
This removes the OKR from your active goals and lets your team start with a clean slate for the next quarter. Archiving the objectives, as opposed to deleting them, allows your team to revisit them later and to see all of the progress they've made over time. You can view all of your team's archived OKRs from the drop down in the menu bar by selecting Archived Goals.