How Isabel Group transformed its approach to strategy execution

Isabel Group is a leading provider of financial solutions. Its suite of proprietary products, including Isabel 6 (a multi-bank payment platform), Ponto (open banking), Kube (verified corporate data), and IntelliSuite (fraud monitoring), ensures seamless, secure, and reliable financial transactions for its clients.

The Challenge

Despite its success, Isabel Group’s Technology Services Department identified opportunities to improve its strategic goal-setting process. While the existing approach achieved results, it occasionally focused too heavily on output-based objectives, leading to:

• Misalignment across teams and divisions;
• Lack of regular review cycles and guidance for updating OKRs to reflect shifting priorities;
• Siloed goals that hindered cross-functional collaboration.

To find a viable solution to these challenges, Isabel Group’s CTO, Tim Van der Wee, turned to the OKRs (Objective and Key Results). With Oboard OKR software and executeOn OKR consulting, he set out to build a new, more aligned and organized system capable of managing thousands of OKR data points and tracking them in real-time.

The Solution

Goal-setting is the most important process when designing the company’s strategy, and the more effort you put into it, the better the outcome. To maximize the impact of Isabel Group’s goals, executeOn designed a fit-to-purpose OKR process streamlined with Oboard’s OKR Board for Jira.

1. Reviewing Existing OKRs

One significant challenge with implementing OKRs at any company is building objectives focused on outcomes rather than task completion. To achieve this with Isabel Group, a series of one-on-one OKR training sessions with the OKR owners was held. This shift reoriented efforts toward achieving measurable results.

2. OKR Training and Foundation Workshops

OKRs are relatively simple compared to other goal-setting frameworks, but professional OKR training maximizes their effectiveness. Using real-life examples from the company’s existing OKRs, a series of workshops were held, demonstrating how to transform ineffective OKRs into effective ones and highlighting the distinction between outcomes and outputs.

3. Separating Business-as-Usual (BAU) from OKRs

BAU (business-as-usual), or routine, are the tasks you handle regularly as part of your general work duties. They are important and need to be tracked, but they are not OKRs — because OKRs are all about change, and routine is not. Unfortunately, many newcomers to the methodology do not understand the concept, preferring to use OKRs to track what they already do instead.

By leveraging Oboard’s integration with Jira, executeOn helped Isabel Group to distinguish BAU tasks from OKRs. From this point on, OKRs were focused on strategic, transformative goals while BAU was seamlessly tracked within existing workflows.

4. Establishing Weekly OKR Check-ins

Using Oboard to hold weekly check-ins facilitated regular discussions around OKRs, allowed teams to update their OKRs directly within the platform, and promoted accountability. It also led to more effective meeting preparation, which resulted in more meaningful conversations, more productive collaboration, and overall higher performance.

5. Introducing an OKR Cycle

Oboard’s analytics and reporting tools enhanced quarterly retrospectives and goal-setting workshops, enabling continuous improvement and the ability to refine objectives based on real-time insights.

The Results

With Oboard as the foundation of its OKR implementation and expert guidance from executeOn, Isabel Group significantly improved its goal-setting and strategic alignment.

Focus on Critical Objectives

Oboard’s streamlined dashboards allowed the teams to monitor their OKRs and reevaluate their usefulness constantly. As a result, unnecessary OKRs were eliminated, allowing teams to concentrate on the Objectives driving meaningful change.

Outcome-Based Key Results

Teams shifted from input- and output-based key results to outcome-focused OKRs. However, some outcome-focused OKRs are lagging indicators and poorly suited for real-time monitoring. In these cases, the teams were recommended to introduce at least one outcome-focused OKR while keeping the rest output-based.

NOTE: For further information on output- and outcome-focused OKRs, check out our infographic!

Enhanced Transparency

Isabel Group was already using Jira to manage its tasks and track progress toward achieving its goals. However, the data was not widely available, and the lack of transparency led to misalignment and misunderstandings within the company.

Oboard’s dashboards allowed the teams to visualize their progress data in a transparent and easily readable manner. This transparency furthered the teams’ alignment and improved communication between stakeholders.

Increased Performance

All of these changes led to a higher performance QoQ, with teams consistently reaching much higher results.

Conclusion

Through a close partnership with executeOn and the powerful capabilities of Oboard, Isabel Group’s Technology Services Department successfully transformed its approach to strategy execution. Oboard’s robust platform enabled teams to focus on outcome-based objectives, streamline progress tracking, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. At the same time, executeOn’s expertise ensured a smooth implementation process tailored to Isabel Group’s unique needs.

Ready to transform your organization’s approach to strategic goal-setting? Schedule a demo with Oboard to learn how our platform and expert partners like executeOn can help you achieve meaningful results.