August 25, 2022
How to Improve Dependability Using DevOps Teams and OKRs
What exactly does OKR mean?
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are frameworks for setting and tracking goals and outcomes. They also facilitate conversations about how a job’s aims coincide with the firm’s.
OKRs cannot flourish without a solid, welcoming, and innovative workplace culture. Your concentration, alignment, commitment, and goal-tracking are all provided through OKRs.
What distinguishes KPI and OKR from one another?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measured within the framework, whereas OKRs are frameworks. Therefore, KPIs demonstrate how successfully you accomplish your OKRs.
KPIs are assigned to each OKR that you intend to achieve. When creating KPIs, ensure they are clear and attainable and that your OKRs are simple to apply and measure.
Google and OKRs
Google uses OKRs to explain, track, and achieve its goals. Unfortunately, poorly planned OKRs squander time, whereas well-executed OKRs inspire teams to accomplish their objectives. Teams can better grasp tradeoffs in their daily work with well-planned OKRs. While KPIs focus on “how,” OKRs address “what.”
What are effective OKRs?
Good OKRs possess the following qualities:
Focus: OKRs encourage focused, disciplined labor by outlining the expected outcomes. When you focus on fewer than five objectives at a time, you allocate most of your energy to your most important goals.
Autonomy: Specified results ensure that everyone knows how and when to contribute, supporting job ownership.
Alignment: Develop OKRs in light of organizational objectives. Organizations are led in the proper direction by OKRs.
Accountability: OKRs encourage staff to take ownership of their job.
Transparency: The OKR framework creates an open culture in which all goals are transparent, and everyone can see progress.
What do you mean by OKRs?
Reasonable goals are in line with your company’s mission. Key results complement assigned objectives.
You can find reasonable goals by enquiring:
Are they significant?
Do they have balls?
Do they awe you?
As you ask: "While identifying good vital results”:
Do they have deadlines and specifics?
Are they aggressive and grounded?
Can they be measured and verified?
Engineering OKR illustrations
Consider the following when setting OKRs for your engineering team:
Goal: Create excellent software
Key Outcomes:
Deliver a specific amount of features per development cycle.
Decrease the number of bugs by a sizable amount.
Goal: Increasing system security
Key Outcomes:
Deliver top-notch security training to all team members.
Increase the number of backups of your data.
Goal: Improve code quality
Key Outcomes:
Reduced load time.
Inspire engineers to write code documentation.
Goal: Maintain up-to-date knowledge on advancements in your sector.
Key Outcomes:
Listen to weekly episodes of podcasts in your field.
Read at least two industry-related books regularly.
Team-level objectives may be set by management or teammates.
Examples of reliability OKR
To create a good service, you must first increase its reliability. OKRs that you can set to influence the reliability of your systems include:
For on-call engineers, lower the MTTR.
Make sure incidents don’t exceed the budget for mistakes.
Reduce the amount of manual labor that first responders must perform.
Increase the rate of increment in SRE project work.
Reduce the operational work rate.
Limit the occurrence of incidents.
Increased response time of APIs.
Reduce coding errors.
Increase microservice failover design.
Network latency should be decreased for your top services.
Increase developer awareness of the black swan incident.
Assure realistic SLA targets aligned with current SLIs for a higher proportion of accounts (97.5%).
OKRs, culture, and reliability: Why DevOps teams need them
You can strengthen your company’s OKR culture by:
Establishing distinct, long-term goals: Teams work more efficiently when they know the organization’s long-term priorities. Employees can better grasp how to direct their efforts when the company has clear goals.
Checking in frequently with your teammates: Keep track of how things are concerning your objectives. Employees benefit from mentorship as they learn and improve. Inform them if they are on pace to achieve their goals by evaluating their progress.
It is appropriate for managers to congratulate team members on their accomplishments if they are performing effectively. Employee morale and productivity are positively affected by boss praise.
The purpose of reliability is to enhance your company as a whole. The following are the top results that will assist you in achieving this objective:
Cloud-based service hosting
Monitoring every one of your infrastructures.
Advantages of OKRs for engineering teams
Managers build high-performing teams by involving and empowering their team members. Therefore, high-level goals set at the start of the year are insufficient. To monitor their employees’ behavior, managers must have policies in place. But unfortunately, employees quickly forget how their actions connect to the organization’s priorities without follow-up measures.
Businesses have solved this issue by implementing the OKR goal-setting and tracking methods. OKR advantages include:
They enhance teamwork and increase employees’ sense of commitment to the purpose of the business.
They provide people and groups with a clear course to follow.
OKRs boost the output of your team.
Regular goal-progress monitoring is possible using OKRs.
They help you make more wise and practical business judgments.
They assist you in measuring your objectives and being more accountable to your coworkers.
They aid in your analysis of how closely outcomes match the business’s mission, vision, and primary goals.
Increasing dependability using OKRs
The following primary outcomes will directly impact the dependability of your services, as well as make your aims distinct and trackable.
Key outcomes
Lessen the MTTR for on-call engineers by 10%.
Create buffers to ensure incidents are within 80% of the error budget.
Reduce the amount of false-positive system alerts to lower the cost of on-call staff.
SLI coverage should be increased from 95% to 100% for all services offered.
Reduce the amount of one-sprint increments to streamline SRE project work.
Time spent on operational duties should be reduced from 70% to 60%.
Reduced occurrences from 7 out of 10 to 5 out of 10.
Ensure 97.5% of the accounts have reasonable SLA targets following the current SLIs.
Reduce latency for the most used services by 2.5%.
Increase the application’s average load time by 0.25%.
Make an effort to lower open-source software errors by 10%.
The proportion of developers aware of black-swan events should be raised to 90%.
Every situation you encounter should be subjected to a post-mortem.
Every team should start their development process with tests.
SREs should create new test plans for each feature request made by clients.
Provide software and solutions that increase productivity by 40%.
Organize training sessions to teach employees the most efficient ways to set up their infrastructure.
Prepare a strategy to deal with demand spikes up to 25% of your burst capacity.
Boost the average interval between system failures (MTBF).
Reduction in Mean Time to Repair (MTTR).
Bugs should be fewer with each new feature and product release.
Contexting the actual outcomes might be helpful as a quick reminder of their importance. Prioritizing also reveals information that helps in achieving corporate objectives.
You can also provide these extra facts to describe the key results.