OKRs, Kanban, Weekly Planning: Which Method Fits Which Team

OKRs, Kanban, or weekly planning: why the question is framed wrongly

The team works a lot, and yet the important things are left undone. So a method is needed. One person has read about OKRs, another swears by Kanban, a third simply wants a Monday meeting. The discussion then revolves around which method is the best.

That question is misleading, because the three methods do not do the same job at all. They answer three different questions on three different time horizons. Once you have understood that, you no longer choose by fashion. You choose by the question that is currently unanswered in your team.

This three-question model is the common thread of this article. First check which of the three questions your team cannot answer with confidence today. That is where you start. The central question, then: which method fits which open question in your team, and how do the three work together? To answer it, I first introduce OKRs, Kanban, and weekly planning one by one, then match them to team size, and finally show how they interlock and where their limit lies.

What are OKRs, and when are they worth it?

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. An objective describes in words what is to be achieved. Two to four key results make it measurable how progress will be recognized. A quarterly rhythm is customary. The method goes back to Andy Grove at Intel and became widely known through John Doerr and its use at Google.

An example from sales shows the structure. The numbers are freely chosen.

• Objective: Customers receive their quote so quickly that they no longer have to ask for it.
• Key result 1: Average time from inquiry to quote drops from ten to three business days.
• Key result 2: Every quote has a follow-up date when it is sent.
• Key result 3: The share of quotes that turn into orders rises from 20 to 25 percent.

The strength of OKRs lies in alignment across team boundaries. When sales, engineering, and the office each pursue their own priorities, shared goals force an order. The weakness is the effort: formulating goals, aligning them, measuring regularly, and evaluating at the end of the quarter. In a team of six people who talk to each other every day, that is often more ceremony than benefit.

What is Kanban, and what does limiting work in progress achieve?

Kanban originates from production control at Toyota and was later transferred to office and knowledge work. The basic idea is plain. All tasks sit as cards on a board. Columns represent the path of the work, for example “To do,” “In progress,” “Waiting for feedback,” and “Done.” Everyone sees at a glance what is in progress and where things pile up.

The most important part is often left out: the limit on parallel work, known as the work-in-progress limit or WIP limit. It defines how many cards may sit in a column at the same time. Once the limit is reached, something gets finished before anything new begins. A simple calculation shows why this works.

In all four cases everything is done after twelve days. The difference lies in when the individual tasks are finished. If you work sequentially, you deliver the first task after two days and the average task after seven. If you start everything at once, you deliver nothing for twelve days. For a customer waiting for a quote, that is a big difference.

Kanban suits teams with a lot of day-to-day business where new requests keep arriving: inside sales, support, order processing. Work there is hard to plan ahead but easy to steer when the number of parallel cases is limited.

What does weekly planning do?

Weekly planning is the smallest of the three methods. It consists of a fixed meeting, usually on Monday, in which the team defines what will be finished by Friday. Each person names a few results, three at most. A short review follows at the end of the week.

Its advantage is the low threshold. You need no training, no software, and no roles. A 30-minute meeting and a shared list are enough. At the same time it enforces the habit on which the other two methods build: deciding together once a week what takes priority.

It reaches its limit when several teams depend on each other or when nobody knows which larger goal the weekly results contribute to. Then the answer to the question of direction is missing, and the week fills up with urgent matters.

Which method fits which team size?

Team size is a good first indicator, because the need for coordination grows with every additional person. The following thresholds are rules of thumb and not a prescription.

How do OKRs, Kanban, and weekly planning work together?

The three methods are not mutually exclusive. In a well-run company they form three levels that build on one another. The order of introduction runs from the bottom up, that is, from the week to the quarter.

1. Weekly planning first

   The team gets used to naming a few results every week and checking them on Friday. This is the foundation for everything else.

2. Then the board

   The weekly results and the day-to-day business become visible on a board. As soon as things pile up, add a limit on parallel work.

3. Quarterly goals last

   Once the week runs reliably, the question of the quarter becomes worthwhile. Two to three goals are enough. In weekly planning the team checks which result contributes to which goal.

The bottom-up route has a simple reason. A quarterly goal is only worth as much as the weeks in which people work on it. If a team does not keep its weekly commitments, it will not reach quarterly goals either. In that case a bigger method does not help; only a smaller one does.

The most common mistake: expecting a method to solve a leadership problem

Methods are often introduced to solve a problem that no method can solve: missing priorities. When everything is important, no board and no goal system will help. The cards then simply pile up visibly, and the goals are so numerous that they exclude nothing.

No method relieves you of deciding what will not be done. It only shows that this decision is missing.

This is no argument against methods. It is a pointer to what they do: they make visible where decisions are missing. The rest is up to you as the owner or managing director. You can check with a few questions whether your team is ready for a method.

• We can name the three most important initiatives of this quarter in one sentence.
• There is at least one initiative that we have deliberately postponed or dropped.
• Every task has exactly one responsible person.
• We have a fixed meeting in which we talk about priorities.
• When two things collide, it is clear who decides.

The next step

1. Ask your team the three questions: Where do we want to go? What is in progress right now? What will be finished by Friday?
2. Note which question was hardest to answer. That is your starting point.
3. If you are unsure, start with weekly planning. It costs 30 minutes and does no harm in any case.
4. Set a date in twelve weeks on which you check whether the method runs without reminders.
5. Only then decide whether to add a second method.

This is how a system grows that fits your company. It consists of a few habits that run reliably, and not of a catalog of methods that nobody lives by.

Back to the opening question: OKRs, Kanban, and weekly planning do not compete with each other; they answer different questions on different time horizons. Which method fits first depends on which question your team cannot answer with confidence today. None of the three solves a leadership problem.