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The Definitive Step-by-step Guide for Setting Up Quantive Results

Learn how to drive alignment, performance, focus, and engagement with OKRs. Use this guide to set up your organization's Quantive account.

Boyan Barnev avatar
Written by Boyan Barnev
Updated over 2 years ago

Organizations adopt OKRs to drive the following parameters forward:

  1. Alignment

  2. Performance

  3. Focus

  4. Engagement
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In this guide, we will show you how to do this by using Quantive Results. 

Setup

The first thing you need to do is to decide the OKR cycle of the company.

Before doing so, you should keep in mind that companies typically plan OKRs in quarters (3-month periods). However, it’s not uncommon for smaller and larger companies to use shorter (1 or 2 months) and longer (6 to 12) periods of time, respectively. 

To setup your company’s cadence, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to OKRs in the side navigation pane.

  2. Click on All Sessions

  3. Click on the Create a session button

  4. Define your first session for the current quarter by filling in the Title and Timeframe sections, Also choose whether your session will have a Parent Session, choose the cadence of your session, choose the color to identify this session in alignment mode, set permissions on who will have access to this session and enable approval workflow if needed. Once complete click the CREATE SESSION button.

After doing this, you’re ready to start driving your organization towards improving the alignment, performance focus, and productivity parameters.
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You can learn more about OKR sessions in this article.

Create a Top level objective

Goal: Set top-level objectives so that your teammates can align their objectives with the company ones.

To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to OKRs in the side navigation pane.

  2. Click on All Sessions then select the Session you would like to add an objective to.

  3. Once in the selected session, Click on the Create OKR button 

  4. Define your objective as follows:

  • Give a title to your objective: Increase demand

  • Select an Owner: by default you are the objective owner, you can add individuals or teams to the owner field by typing them in the field or choosing them from the drop down menu.

  • Select a parent Objective or Key Result: your objective can support an objective or key result in this session or its parent session.

5. Once complete click on the Create OKR button

Congratulations! You've just created your top-level objective within your session. This is the first step towards achieving alignment in your organization.

To learn more about defining your OKRs, we recommend reading the following article: Best Practices for OKRs.

Invite Users to your account

Now, let's invite some of the teammates to Quantive Results. After all, one cannot align with oneself.

  1. Navigate to People in the side navigation pane.

  2. Click on Employees

  3. Click on the Invite users button on the top right of your Employees page.

  4. Enter the Email of the teammate you would like to invite to your account.

    You can enter multiple email addresses separated by a comma or space.

  5. Next you can assign the teammate to a role or team. Once finished click on Invite Users.

After inviting your team members to join Quantive Results, you can then start defining objectives for them. For better illustrating purposes, the top-level objective that we just created in the previous step will also be used in the following example. 

To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to OKRs in the side navigation pane.

  2. Click on All Sessions then select the Session you would like to add an objective to.

  3. Click on the Create OKR button.

  4. In this example, we will define a child objective that will support our top-level objective to Increase demand. Define it as follows:

  • Write your objective: Increase organic traffic

  • Select an Owner: by default you are the objective owner, you can add individuals or teams to the owner field by typing them in the field or choosing them from the drop down menu.

  • Select a parent Objective or Key Result: your objective can support an objective or key result in this session or its parent session.

  • For this example we will set the top-level objective we created in the previous step, as our Parent objective to complete alignment.

  • Click on the Create OKR button

By aligning this objective with the top-level objective of Increasing demand, we have started to achieve an alignment within our organization. In order to define the goals and strategy for the current period, we should repeat this process right from the start.

You can navigate to the Alignment subsection under the OKRs screen view to see visual representation of objectives within your organization.

Performance

Goal: Define key results that will allow us to track and improve performance against our objectives.

Once we have defined the objectives, we can now start defining key results which are effectively success metrics.

  1. Navigate to OKRs in the side navigation pane.

  2. Click on All Sessions then select the desired Session.

  3. Click the objective you would like to add the key result to.

  4. Once the objective page opens, scroll down and click on the Add a key result link.

  5. Define your first key result as follows:

  • Title: 100 new opportunities

  • Key Result type: Should Increase to

  • Unit: %

  • Target Number: 100

  • Initial number: 0

  • Select the owner or owners

6. Click on the Add Key Result button

Typically, best practices point out that every objective should have 2-4 key results defined. To learn more about defining key results read our help article on Define Key Results and Objective progress based on the average of its key results and child objectives

Attaching quantitative key results to objectives defines the tactics behind achieving objectives but also gives everyone an insight how well is the organization performing.

As your organization grows, the OKRs > Statistics view will become indispensable as it shows aggregated performance of all the OKRs in the given session.

Focus

Goal: Make sure everyone is focused on what's important and that OKRs won't become a laundry list of things that would be nice to do.

OKRs are as much about what will not be done as they are about what will be done. When just starting out, many organizations fall into the practice of defining too many objectives.

Quantive Results helps you manage this process by limiting the number of objectives a person can have in any given session as well as number of key results any given objective can have.
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Here’s how to do so in a few simple steps:

  1. Click on the Settings icon in the side navigation

  2. Under the System section click on Methodology

  3. Scroll to the middle of the page

  4. Set following values:

  • Limit the number of objectives per user: 1

  • Click Save button

  • Limit the number of key results per objective: 3

  • Click Save button

OKRs best practices recommend that there are up to 3 objectives per person and up to 4 key results per objective. However, in practice, we have found out that organizations that start with more limited approach of 1 objective per user and 3 key results per objective are more successful in adopting OKRs.

By limiting the number of objectives any given person can have, we enforce radical focus within our organization. 

Engagement

Goal: Celebrate every victory, give credit where it's due, and advice where needed.

People are engaged when they have a purpose and when their contributions are being recognized. As companies grow, this simple fact can often be overlooked. OKRs and Quantive, however, help you keep this essential part of the culture as you scale.

First, through transparency and alignment of the objectives, it’s easy for every team member to know what is going on and how they contribute to the mission. 

Secondly, Quantive Results provides an easy way for everyone to give feedback and praise.

To do that, just follow these simple steps in order:

  1. Navigate to OKRs in the side navigation pane.

  2. Click on All Sessions then select the desired Session.

  3. Select the Increase organic traffic objective

  4. Scroll at the bottom and leave a comment

  5. Click on the Post button

Summary

In this definitive guide, we have demonstrated how OKRs and Quantive Results can help you drive alignment, performance, focus, and engagement throughout your entire organization.

Quantive Results has been engineered for achieving an overwhelming simplicity and lowering the barriers for OKRs adoption. To learn more about the sophisticated features of Quantive Results, browse our dedicated help section or schedule a demo.

"Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay

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