It’s not often that positive stories come out of the Covid-19 pandemic. But in the case of one local management consultancy business, that’s exactly what happened. For 25 years, the owners of OKRAdvisory were operating a successful management consultancy, focusing primarily on corporate strategy and performance management. It helped both large and small clients from the public and private sectors.
With a keen interest in extending its reach and helping to address the global appetite for corporate strategy development and implementation, the pandemic was the catalyst for the creation of OKRAdvisory.
‘We were advising many clients to start operating within shorter strategy horizons, in addition to offering a more agile approach more commonly recognised within the OKR methodology.
'It was then only a matter of time before we recognised that our approach was very much aligned across the board with that of OKRs,’ explained Marcus Jones, Senior Consultant and OKR Advisor at OKRAdvisory.
‘The dovetailing of our desire to extend our own geographical horizons, with this natural affinity that we already had for the framework, was a significant motivator to launch the business. The final piece of the puzzle was, bizarrely, Covid. With the pandemic came the recognition that these kinds of strategy consulting services could in fact be effectively delivered remotely, and once again out of all the available frameworks out there the one seemingly most conducive was OKR.
‘It was at that point we realised there was a clear opportunity to launch OKRAdvisory, targeting off island business in particular, and gain the necessary accreditation to ensure businesses new to us could be confident of the type and quality of service they would receive.’
OKR is a management methodology that helps to ensure efforts are focused on the same important issues throughout the organisation, and a fundamental change in the way organisations think about setting and achieving their strategic goals that requires cultural self awareness and top to bottom commitment. Put simply, OKRs should transform the organisation.
They are what is commonly referred to as an ‘open source’ framework, enabling organisations to apply a constant set of principles in whatever way works best for them.
With the future more uncertain than ever before, where hybrid and home working away from other employees and colleagues has become the norm and will continue to increase in popularity, and where employees demand a greater say and transparency in the way an organisation evolves and operates, an agile framework such as OKRs has truly found its time.