How Earnest Analytics Organized Their Workflow Using Oboard OKR Software

“The OKR Board for Jira tool covers all our use cases — notably setting of Company OKRs; creating a hierarchy of associated Group (team) contributions; the ability to set scoring using various methods; transparency of progress; and a high-level dashboard to monitor progress […] As well as covering all our primary features, the tool is well designed and very intuitive.”

Earnest Analytics is a data analytics and validation company that acquires, anonymizes, and productizes the most important data assets from many different sources and transforms them into actionable insights. They provide best-in-class real-time data and expert analyses to investors, companies, and consultants. Their annual revenue for 2022 was $19.3M.

They also have been a very active customer at Oboard, providing tons of valuable feedback that helped us grow through the years. For this interview, we spoke to Deirdre O’Brien — the program director at Earnest Analytics.

Background

Earnest Analytics was established back in 2012, and yet it took them until early 2020 to introduce OKRs into their workflow. Their main motivation for switching to OKRs was to help with strategic alignment across the teams and provide clarity of purpose. They needed the individuals and teams to better understand how they can achieve impact.

“We’re using OKRs to empower our teams — to give them ownership over their roadmaps and autonomy over the execution of their projects while supporting these aims within a framework to keep teams aligned with each other and working on projects that deliver towards the company strategy.”

The official OKR adoption was preceded by a rather long research and education period. To gather feedback, Individual managers and their teams studied the OKR framework and learned how to properly implement it. That turned out to be a great idea since it helped to prevent or minimize a lot of potential issues.

How Oboard helped Earnest Analytics

Among the generic pains related to OKR adoption, Earnest had the most issues with SMART goal setting. The teams did not quite understand how to properly set objectives and key results that corresponded with the SMART paradigm — as in, were Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

This is where Oboard’s Key Result Types came into play. Since the OKR Board for Jira follows the OKR framework and allows you to set Key Results only as Numbers, Percentages, or Binary data points, Key Results should focus on actionable data. Therefore, managers at Earnest were encouraged to follow the SMART paradigm more closely and supported in adopting it.

In addition, the engineering teams at Earnest Analytics already used JIRA for task management, and the ability to manage OKRs in the same tool was the cherry on top.

All of this allowed the company to build a strict OKR hierarchy and introduce:

• Flexible OKR scoring methods;
• Transparency of the task statuses;
• A high-level dashboard to monitor progress.
• A simple OKR management UI that was easy to understand and didn’t require additional training.

Conclusion

Earnest Analytics’ OKR adoption wasn’t quite textbook — and yet it was extremely successful, improving their company operation procedures all over the board. In addition, their feedback was very valuable and a lot of current OKR Board for Jira/Salesforce features would not exist without it.

That said, OKRs aren’t for everyone — and despite all the benefits they brought Earnest Analytics, recently the company decided to temporarily move away from them. Due to volatility in business requirements, Earnest found long-term Objectives difficult to set, and are currently looking into alternative frameworks. We hope that this decision will lead Earnest only towards further productivity boosts and can’t wait to see what they decide to do next.

If you are also interested in increasing your company’s productivity and improving transparency in your operations, book a call with Oboard right now! We will help you find the best consultants for your business and make sure that your OKR adoption will be a smooth sailing from start to finish. And if you have already mastered OKRs, kick off your free trial of OKR Board for Jira and start making better decisions right now!