A major European Oil & Gas company, a leader in the energy sector, faced significant challenges with work visibility and operational alignment across its vast network of teams and departments. The lack of transparency into work activities and the alignment between teams led to communication breakdowns, inefficiencies, and wasted efforts. The company turned to a combination of advanced project management tools and the Objectives & Key Results (OKR) framework to enhance strategic alignment and streamline operations across the organization.
Challenges
Before implementing the new strategy, the company dealt with several operational pain points:
Low visibility: The company had almost no insight into which teams were working on what, resulting in just 1% visibility into their work activities.
Misalignment across departments: There was a lack of clear communication between departments regarding how their efforts contributed to the company’s strategic goals.
Obsolete priorities: Many teams continued working on outdated strategic priorities, wasting hundreds of hours on irrelevant tasks.
Fragmented tools and systems: With multiple legacy tools in use across teams, the organization struggled to coordinate projects, track progress, and ensure alignment across departments.
Solution
To resolve these challenges, the company implemented a comprehensive strategy execution solution that focused on improving work visibility and operational alignment. Here’s how the approach unfolded:
Centralized Project Management Board: The company established a centralized management board where all strategic projects and tasks were visualized, providing clear insights into the entire project landscape.
Improved Work Visibility: By integrating real-time updates into the system, all teams could see their progress and the status of their tasks, giving leadership and departments the transparency they needed to make informed decisions.
Operational Alignment: The company aligned project execution with the organization’s strategic goals by breaking down high-level priorities into actionable projects for each department. The centralized platform allowed for clear task delegation and monitoring across teams.
OKRs connected to projects: OKRs were introduced as a tool to ensure alignment between strategic priorities and operational work. Each department adopted OKRs to link their specific goals to the broader company vision. This helped departments track progress against their defined key results, ensuring that projects directly contributed to the overall objectives.
Cross-Department Collaboration: The software solution fostered cross-departmental communication by making strategic OKRs visible to all teams. This ensured everyone knew how their work fit into the broader organizational goals, reducing confusion and improving collaboration.
Conclusion
By improving work visibility and operational alignment, this leading European Oil & Gas company significantly enhanced its ability to execute projects. The use of OKRs as a supporting framework helped ensure that strategic objectives were directly tied to day-to-day activities, but it was the visibility of work and clear alignment across teams that drove the most meaningful improvements.
With better communication, fewer wasted hours, and more efficient resource planning, the company successfully streamlined its operations, positioning itself for greater agility and long-term success.
