How Breakwater Technology Mastered OKRs with Oboard Software and Consulting

“Our infrastructure is Atlassian-oriented, and when we decided to build our OKR system it was crucial for us to have a tool that is maximally integrated with Jira. Also, we prefer lightweight tools over the monstrous ‘all-in-one’ add-ons. Looks like all our requirements were met with the help of OKR Board for Jira by Oboard!”

Breakwater is an Estonian-based company that specializes in tailored customer product development. They offer a full cycle process — from requirements definition and specification to software coding and development to application support and maintenance.

Breakwater is also one of our most interesting cases — their OKR journey is tightly connected to both Oboard and our consulting partner agiledrive. For the case study, we spoke to Grant Brett, the CEO, and Sergiy, Head of Software Engineering.

Background

Breakwater had attempted to implement the OKR framework before, once, in 2021 — however, they found it insufficient back then, and the top management was neither involved in the process nor impressed with the results.

According to Sergiy, their first OKRs haven’t worked because those were set only on the Department level, and have not been connected to bigger initiatives. They were more accidental and random, thus fading away fast. People didn’t understand the purpose as there wasn’t any. So Breakwater canceled the roll-out, noted down the issues, and prepared for the second try.

Their second attempt was a lot more organized. In order to get the OKR basics down, Breakwater approached Oboard for coaching and consulting — and after a call with our CEO Victor, we recommended agiledrive as the most suitable team for their case.

This time, the initiative began from the top — starting with Mission, Vision, and Strategic Objectives before transforming them into OKRs. This was done by the management team, and after that, the whole company joined to brainstorm the OKRs simultaneously with the help of agiledrive OKR consultants.

Breakwater Challenges

“We like the OKR framework because until now, we’ve measured people well on task output but not so well on outcomes. And in order to be efficient we needed to start doing just that. OKRs make sense, helping motivate people in a way that will help them grow and do things better – via belonging to bigger goals.”

Breakwater was struggling with output-based result evaluation, weak goal alignment between chapters, and lack of encouragement for taking responsibility for the goal outcomes. It did not seem that everyone was involved in working towards achieving the goals. Overall, the company-wide goal-setting process seemed unstructured on both strategic and tactical levels.

Oboard and agiledrive Solution

Breakwater brought up these issues during the discussions with Oboard and agiledrive, and together we came up with the following plan for the near future:

• Train key people in the company on OKRs.
• Enter Q2 with defined and aligned company OKRs and chapter/team OKRs.
• Establish an OKR cycle to define, align, track, and evaluate OKRs in future quarters.

Since the issues Breakwater faced were systemic and came from a poor understanding of OKRs, we at Oboard decided to let agiledrive take the lead on this case. They have a lot of experience teaching OKRs at every level, and with their help, Breakwater quickly refined the company mission and turned the previous strategic goals into a 5-year North Star Goal and company OKRs for 2 years.

“I’m surprised that in an hour we were able to define a mission statement, which is really about us and where we would like to be. Our previous attempt took 2 days, and didn’t really hit the mark.”

This was followed up by two larger workshops for top and middle managers, where they were taught the OKR theory and learned to apply it with Oboard’s OKR Board for Jira. The streamlined interface and the ability to bind tasks to relevant goals greatly helped Breakwater understand the OKRs in practice and earned their highest praise.

Once the management was confident in their understanding of OKRs, agiledrive assembled all of the Breakwater employees for the final two-day workshop. The goal was to provide an overview of the framework, explain the concept of alignment, and make sure that all the departments had enough resources to reach their goals. According to Kristina, the Breakwater HRD, that workshop was a huge success.

OKR Board for Jira Implementation at Breakwater

Breakwater implemented the OKR Board for Jira with the help of our most trusted consultants, and the result is predictably spectacular.

In just three months they not only refined their strategic goals, but also broke them down into department goals and aligned all the teams around them. Now their departments track their OKRs individually with regular check-ins, where they discuss progress on tasks and challenges faced.

Speaking of tasks — with OKR Board for Jira Breakwater was able to connect their OKRs with epics, tasks, and issues in their Jira instance. This further allowed them to see the connection between everyday work and strategic Objectives, incentivizing new employee initiatives. OKR Board for Jira also tracks such OKRs automatically, making Breakwater’s OKR check-ins much easier.

Speaking of check-ins — while Breakwater utilizes this feature in the OKR Board for Jira, they went a little off-the-book. While it is recommended to have the same OKR cadence company-wide, several departments at Breakwater gravitated toward weekly check-ins while others settled on a bi-weekly schedule. With the OKR Board for Jira this is not an issue, and we were able to easily accommodate their new setup.

The main benefits Oboard and agiledrive brought to Breakwater

Together with agiledrive we have completely upended and streamlined the Breakwater company structure, massively expanding their understanding of team management and giving them proper tools for it. By the time the implementation was over, they:

• Received an extensive training course in OKR theory and practice;
• Formulated proper Vision, Mission, and Strategic Objectives for the next five years;
• Designed a roadmap towards said Objectives, breaking them down into annual and quarterly Goals;
• Established Department OKRs for Q2’2023, and aligned the teams around them;
• Bound the Department OKRs to Jira Epics, tasks, and issues using OKR Board for Jira;
• Set up the OKR cycle and in order to keep alignment going forward and adjust their process if necessary.

The exact outcomes of these changes are yet to come, but it is already fair to say that they will be far-reaching. Kristina, the Breakwater HRD, claims that the company now feels extremely cohesive and employees are much more willing to help their colleagues out.

Conclusion

Breakwater case was a highly successful collaboration between Oboard and agiledrive. With our tools and their greater understanding of OKRs, we were able to quickly bring an entire company up to speed, completely transforming their workflow.

If you want to repeat Breakwater’s success and upgrade your company’s management structure with OKRs, set up a kick-off call  with us and we will help you out! Depending on your needs and understanding of OKR framework, we will be happy to suggest a perfect solution for you — including an amazing team of OKR coaches and consultants, if necessary. And if you don’t want to talk to anyone — we get it — you can start your free trial of OKR Board for Jira and make use of our excellent onboarding.