Help find and choose a Simple and Open OKR tool

Archive
1

As we are putting a renewed focus on simple and stable OKRs, I wanted to get people’s opinions on what software might work best. Some options for us are:

  1. Sticking with a google spreadsheet
  2. Using simple OKR software (see https://simpleokr.com)
  3. Using a comprehensive software management platform that has OKR stuff in it
  4. An open source task + productivity tool - incl. OKR’s (http://fluxday.io)
  5. Use Github
  6. Roll our own

My rundown of the above:

  • Spreadsheet provides no clarity and requires a lot of context. Also, the spreadsheet rarely is updated.
  • Simple OKR’s has a cheap Saas model ($50/month fixed) and would be suitable for us. However, it cannot be opened up to the public to view. imo - this is a bit of a deal breaker (unless others feel differently)
  • Fluxday is quite complicated, and I think is overkill for what we want to achieve even though it is open source
  • Mozilla use Github for their OKR’s (Projects · webcompat-team-okrs · GitHub). There is also a simple template that we can use here: OKR example · GitHub, that includes examples for non-tech teams/individuals.
  • We could roll our own, but we’d need to know exactly what we want - which I think its too early for us to gauge that at the moment. Maybe after a quarter or two we’ll have a better idea and can start on a custom solution

I’m leaning towards Github. Even though its not ideal, doesn’t have the simplicity of SimpleOKRs, it’s something that the majority of teams already uses. We just need to do a good job to document and track the location of Individual and Team OKR’s,

What are people thoughts? Is there a better solution out there?!?

2

i think that github will most seamlessly integrate with contributors current workflow, and we could find a way to integrate call the okr’s into the voting dapp automagically, @Graeme ?

I’d also like to see individuals and teams sign their okr’s cryptographically, in line with our principles. (maybe we could even make the final results of an okr vote have a “sign cryptographically” button?

I really think that we dont need yet ANOTHER software tool to interact with. lets minimize cognitive load and go with github!

3

SG. For this round, I want to keep things as simple as possible considering all the changes that are being made. Therefore we probably won’t use the Voting DApp, or add cryptographic signing… for now at least.

4

agree to KISS; lets keep in mind that roadmap though, b/c it will be useful for the status network daos. In this vein, i think that SNIPS should probably be submitted via github as well, once they’ve percolated up from discuss / notes.

5

The Mozilla example looks like a good starting point for us:

  • Github tools
  • Separate OKR repo
  • Create a project for each quarter
  • Issues for each KR
  • Column for objectives for visibility of goals
  • Kanban board for progress visibility
  • Use labels for teams and scoring
  • Team members are assigned to KR issues
  • One repo gives visibility across Status, but can be filtered with labels/teams
2 Likes
6

+1 to github - it’s a tool we already use daily, so feels like it integrates the best into Status life.

7

Another +1 to GitHub/Mozilla example.