Using Enterprise OKRs can help align and focus the Scrum Teams across the organization on common high-level Objectives, but it also has a downside. The risk is that, if an enterprise OKR needs to be changed because it’s become obsolete, it can have quite a cascading effect throughout all the teams. This is an issue because we don’t want the fear of the effects of changing OKRs keep us from being an Agile Enterprise that can change its OKRs when needed without big costs.

For instance, if an enterprise Objective is to ‘Expand into the German market and capture 20% of the market share from our competitors in 10 months’, an enterprise Key Results might read: ‘Conduct a market research of the German market and a SWOT analysis report by Feb. 15’. At the team level, this enterprise KR becomes a team Objective which is broken down into team KRs, such as: ‘Hire a German-speaking Analyst’. Another team breaks down the other enterprise KRs into their team KRs. The potential Domino Effect is created when all this is mapped to Epics, Features and User Stories. Therefore, pick one; maybe OKRs can actually comprise your backlogs.