There is money in fashions. Nowhere more so than in fashionable ways to manage companies, projects or work. Whenever some methodology is applied to some proce

There is money in fashions. Nowhere more so than in fashionable ways to manage companies, projects or work. Whenever some methodology is applied to some process, the precise way in which it is applied tends to vary. A lot. How many times have you heard "we use <methodology>" followed by "well...our version of it anyway". Of course, whenever someone admits to not strictly following orthodox doctrine there are howls of "you are not doing it properly". I've been a software developer a long enough to take neither the peddlers of fashionable methodologies, nor the people who decry them as utter nonsense, very seriously. It is odd how people tend to confuse wishful thinking with reality when they start to get a bit hot under the collar arguing about these things. I've seen OKRs work and not work. I've seen scrum work and not work. I've seen kanban work and not work. You can't really predict what will work for a given team, doing a given project in a given organization. You try, you adapt and if something works, then great. Two things never cease to amaze me: 1) delusional or blind leaders who think that some methodology works for them just because they like to think so, while their employees hate their life. And 2) people who think that some orthodox system of thought invented outside their organization is going to work without modification. The problem isn't so much OKRs. It is the failure to either make it work in your organization *or* find something else that does. I've worked in places where OKRs worked supremely well. I've worked in more places where OKRs didn't work at all. Mostly because people got caught up in the ceremony and didn't really stop to ask "does this help us accomplish what we need to accomplish?".