What Do You Do When OKRs Become Too Much Administrative Work?

Does it ever feel like OKRs are too much overhead?

Does it make sense that OKRs will only work when “we will have more people to manage them”?

Let’s be honest - OKRs can sometimes feel a bit heavy:

• It takes time to draft them (especially if you’re trying to capture everything via OKRs…)

• It takes time to align (especially if you’re driving them top-down, relying on large single-track meetings to converge, and are structured in a way where most strategic objectives hit many teams)

• It takes time to manage / track (again, especially if you have many OKRs spanning significant cross-sections of the organization)

If you’re tempted to hire a PMO to manage your OKRs because they’ve become too much for your Chief of Staff to tackle, it’s a major warning sign.

So what’s the alternative?

One approach you can try is to go very lightweight. Whatever the company goals are, capture them.

Don’t spend time on wordsmithing and outcome orientation, at least for now.

Start a kanban board to manage progress/traction on these goals.

Don’t try to manage all work via OKRs - just strategic guidance beyond the whirlwind.

If there’s a strategic initiative that cuts across too many functions and requires “project management,” consider a lightweight agile approach like Scrum to manage it. You do not need dedicated agile roles, but somebody should own steering toward the desired outcome, and there should be clarity on who’s involved and who has dedicated capacity for it.

Be very careful when letting people be involved in multiple such strategic initiatives. Limit the number of initiatives in progress if they all hit the same people.

Here’s the thing - some of the administrative overhead that OKRs bring can be avoided by sticking to the principles and being careful with process theater.

Some of it isn’t really OKR administrative overhead—it’s just growing pains. It’s a sign that you’re approaching an inflection point and need to make some tough decisions about your organizational topology.

You don’t have to use OKRs, EOS, or Scrum. But if you do want to scale up, you will need to figure out how to enable aligned autonomy.

(I’m curious - if you used OKRs and have now switched to another operating system, what did you switch to? How is it different?)