Ever wonder what is the difference between Output and Outcome and how to use in project management and OKR?   

Output 

Output are the tangible and measurable deliverables achieved as a result of executing a project or OKR.   

An output or a deliverable would be something like: 

“By Milestone 5 of the project, we would have installed 30 cloud VMs and migrated 50 databases from on-prem to cloud” 

Outcome  

An outcome example would be: 

“By the end of Q4, we would be off a legacy infrastructure platform, and expect to reduce incident recover time from 72hrs to less than 2hrs, thus eliminating the risk of $50 thousand of potential lost per 1 hour of downtime.”   

 If you as the project manager delivering this infrastructure platform upgrade project, your project might be strategically aligned to a company OKR to improve uptime of revenue generating applications and reduce financial lost as a result of downtime. 

 You might be participating in a project that was created as a result of a failed internal disaster recovery audit, thus delivering a project to pass the audit by the end of the project.   

 Your project output would therefore be aligned to a grand outcome, like a company wide strategic OKR outcome.  

In Conclusion 

Output is tangible and measurable deliveries delivered by a project or OKR key result. 

Outcome is the benefits achieved as a result of delivering the outcome, strategically aligned to company Goals or OKRs. 

 

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