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Good stuff, @Sebastian_Paasch. I handle OKRs a little bit differently, incorporating tags a bit to enable reporting on Objectives and Key Results separately.
Because I make a living teaching others about Asana, I keep some of my best material inside the Asana Training Masterclass which is a paid course for businesses that want to learn Asana and have employees onboard themselves. In this case, I have a whole lesson dedicated to tracking OKRs in Asana.
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@Sebastian_Paasch We’re implementing that system and your post gave me an awesome framework for communicating it in the company and using asana to keep everything nice & clean. Everyone is now very excited and enjoying to the organizational & management improvement! Keep doing, what you’re doing 
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Hey @Sebastian_Paasch, I will start implementing OKRs here very soon as well. Thank you so much for the post, it gives me a good headstart on figuring out how our OKRs are set up in Asana the best!
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@Sebastian_Paasch this is one of the BEST post I’ve seen here on the community! Well done!!! I’m curious though, you don’t like any of the currently existing OKR software integrations with Asana instead of going through all that? http://okrsoftware.com/
Seems to me like like either BetterWorks, WeekDone, or 7Geese will be pretty competitive by the end of 2017 for Asana reporting/integration of the OKR framework?
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Hi Sam,
Thanks for the feedback, always good to hear if it helps someone.
So far, no integration has really convinced me.
And thanks for the website, I did not know this overview.
From my point of view and many dicussions with other Asana users it is important to:
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Have as few tools as possible, but as many as necessary --> if an integration does not provide significant added value, I do not add it, because every tool increases complexity a lot and makes it harder for people. For me it is important to make Asana as easy as possible for its users, that they really like to work with it, also people who are no digital natives.
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Make it as transparent as possible: If all the OKRs are directly in Asana and moreover also in the different projects as reminder, it is much more likely that team members will act on it, and this is most important
But I am very open for feedback. Do you use one of these extensions? What is the added value for you exactly?
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No I don’t use any of them now @Sebastian_Paasch but doing heavy research which is why I’m asking. At first I thought BetterWorks was my choice but then found out it’s $19,000 USD (hahaha) so now it’s between WeekDone or 7Geese.
We touched on not only OKR’s but other high-level views/features needed here - A better Dashboard for high level overview
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@Sebastian_Paasch love this post. I’m very new to roadmapping our objectives. We know them but have never strategically planned them out.
Why are there subtask objectives in the vision task but also objectives in the quarters sections? Are they not all working towards the same vision?
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This is the reason why the objectives are sub-tasks of the vision - to indicate that everything pays into the vision, every single task from every team member 
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@Sebastian_Paasch If you use a “Custom Field” how do you know which KR is done? after all you could have a few KR’s for each objective (BTW this article help me greatly)
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I use another custom field where I track the progress in %, if done completely it is 100%.
Of course you can also use sub-tasks for your KR, but many people found it better to use Custom Fields.
Best
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So they are duplicates? When one is completed does the assignee have to check both matching tasks?
@Sebastian_Paasch This is a fantastic, and easy to implement, structure for setting up and tracking our OKRs in Asana. Just what I was looking for — thanks!
I’ll need to re-read the post a few times to squeeze all the ideas and value out of it, but I think your comments hit on the major reasons it’ll work for our use case. We are new to the OKR framework and currently just piloting it within our Digital Team. Similarly, Asana usage started as a bit of a skunkworks at our organization, but now has serious (leadership) momentum behind it now and we’re ramping up the plans to expand it across the company.
While OKRs will be a little behind that process (whether or not they ever become org-wide), I love the points you’ve made here around simplifying the tool-stack and ensuring that above all, the transparency remains a top priority. That’s the whole point of OKRs — ensuring others are aware of where your energy and focus is, as well as driving accountability.
I love this kind of crowd-sourcing to help one another realize the potential of such an open-end platform as Asana, before doubling down on 3rd party integrations and increasing the complexity of your team’s workflow. That is a good pitfall to be mindful of for exactly the reasons you’ve stated here.
Well done.
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Thankfully no. And I did notice that @Sebastian_Paasch’s original post glossed over this unique and powerful Asana feature, which I have been using for a while.
Basically, within one project it’s possible to list a single task as both a task in the highest-level project list… and a subtask of another task in that list. I’ve made a quick screencast to show this in action:
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@pbiolsi Thank you. I’ve actually used that feature to share tasks across projects but never thought to share a task within a project. Very helpful!
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@Sebastian_Paasch Ok I just set everything up Asana and I’m ready to dominate! HOWEVER, now I’ve come to the part about reporting or direct measuring of KR’s (like Google’s 0-1 scale w/ one decimal place) and I’m realizing if I use the “% Progress” custom field like you have then I can’t see it on the dashboard or any reports, correct? 
Do you have any ideas for me as to how I might, using this OKR model, get quantitative reporting on progression of KR’s and Objectives?
@pbiolsi would love to now you’re thoughts as well on this! 
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Hi Sam,
Thanks for your feedback and questions.
You do not see it in the Asana dashboard that is correct, but with data stored in Custom Fields you can do everything you want. You can export it to a spreadsheet and build charts on the data there. Moreover, I am sure there are reporting plugins which can use Custom Field data and create charts automatically, if not yet, you could send a message to the reporting plug in developer of your choice like @Eyal_Ronel and perhaps they can integrate it in their dashboards.
Best
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Thanks for tagging my @Sebastian_Paasch
I would be happy to follow up with you about what Itai and I have been up to. I’ll email you soon!
@Sam_Leahey and I have previously discussed a few topics regarding better reporting as part of what I’m working on. We’ll be announcing something new very soon. stay tuned
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