You’ll recognise this story if you’ve ever…

• Sat in a year-end review where every director arrived with a different version of “where we are”
• Watched analysts pull late nights to assemble a regulator response from spreadsheets already out of date
• Realised in October that you couldn’t honestly say whether the work being done was the work that had been promised
• Watched a perfectly good district team hit all their operational targets while the company missed the one number the regulator actually cared about

The challenge

Their strategy wasn’t wrong. It just kept getting lost on the way down.

Water utilities don’t really write their own ambition. The regulator does. Every few years a thick determination document lands, and the company spends the next half-decade trying to deliver against it. Leakage targets. Water-quality requirements. Customer service standards. Environmental commitments. Capital efficiency.

That part’s easy to explain. The hard part is what happens next.

The determination got turned into a corporate plan. The corporate plan became annual plans. Annual plans got broken into quarterly commitments. Quarterly commitments went to directors. Directors handed pieces to heads of operation. Heads of operation handed pieces to area managers. By the time anything reached a treatment plant or a network crew, it had been translated and reinterpreted so many times that the original line from the regulator wasn’t visible anymore.

It wasn’t that people had stopped caring about the strategy. They just couldn’t see it.

• A district team would spend a whole quarter hitting every operational target they’d been given. Response times, repair counts, customer callbacks. Then they’d sit in a year-end review and find out none of it had moved the leakage number the regulator actually cared about. They’d done good work. It just hadn’t been the right work.
• The capital programme and the operations side kept making decisions that worked against each other. Capital was optimising for asset replacement over a decade. Operations was optimising for this year’s service measures. Both made sense. Together, they kept bumping into each other.
• Quarterly business reviews were exhausting. Every director arrived with their own slide deck, their own numbers, their own view of “where we are.” Nothing reconciled. The first hour of every meeting was just establishing the baseline.
• When the regulator opened a mid-cycle query, and they do, pulling together a response was a small fire drill. Someone in strategy would call directors, who’d call heads, who’d call team leaders, who’d dig through their own spreadsheets. By the time the picture was assembled, half of it was already a month old.

They’d tried fixes. A strategy office. A new reporting template. An internal portal that nobody opened twice. Each one helped a bit. None of them held.

The trigger

They looked at several platforms. Most handled the top of the org. None of them held at depth.

The evaluation didn’t start with features. It started with a question the COO asked in the first vendor meeting. “Will a network team supervisor actually open this on a Monday morning?” That became the bar. It turned out to be a high one.

Most of the platforms they looked at were clearly built with software companies in mind. Cascading product OKRs. Sprint-aligned check-ins. The whole vocabulary of a tech firm. Lovely for that world. This isn’t that world. The people who needed to use it ran treatment plants, dispatched crews, managed capital projects, and answered the phones when a customer’s street was flooding. The tool had to feel useful to them, not just to a strategy team in head office.

Profit.co was the one that didn’t fight the shape of the organisation. The cascade went all the way down without thinning out. The check-in cadence could be configured to match how teams actually worked. Weekly for some. Fortnightly for others. Monthly where that made more sense. The dashboards could be set up for an executive committee and for a district manager, and they’d both feel like they’d been built for that person.

The decision wasn’t dramatic. It was just clear.

The solution

“Will a network supervisor open this on a Monday morning?”

The evaluation didn’t start with features. It started with a question the COO asked in the first vendor meeting. “Will a network team supervisor actually open this on a Monday morning?” That became the bar. It turned out to be a high one.

Most of the platforms they looked at were clearly built with software companies in mind. Cascading product OKRs. Sprint-aligned check-ins. The whole vocabulary of a tech firm. Lovely for that world. This isn’t that world. The people who needed to use it ran treatment plants, dispatched crews, managed capital projects, and answered the phones when a customer’s street was flooding. The tool had to feel useful to them, not just to a strategy team in head office.

Profit.co was the one that didn’t fight the shape of the organisation. The cascade went all the way down without thinning out. The check-in cadence could be configured to match how teams actually worked. Weekly for some. Fortnightly for others. Monthly where that made more sense. The dashboards could be set up for an executive committee and for a district manager, and they’d both feel like they’d been built for that person.

The decision wasn’t dramatic. It was just clear.

How the OKR programme actually runs

The transformation

A few things landed harder than anyone had predicted. One thing didn’t land at all.

The first surprise was how quickly the language of meetings changed. Within a couple of quarters, internal reviews stopped opening with “where are we?” and started opening with what the dashboard showed. That sounds small. It isn’t. Hours of every senior meeting used to be spent agreeing on the picture. Once everyone trusted the same picture, the meeting became about decisions.

The second was what happened in regulator queries. Those used to be the fire drills. Directors getting called in. Analysts pulling late nights. The strategy office stitching together a response that already felt out of date when it went out the door. Now the data was just there. The query came in. The relevant team opened the platform. The response was assembled from existing data, and the numbers held up to scrutiny because they hadn’t been hand-copied from anything.

The third was harder to name. People started flagging risks earlier. Not because anyone had asked them to. The check-in cadence and the visibility of the cascade just made it feel worse to sit on a problem than to say something. That shift didn’t show up in any KPI, but the COO called it the most valuable thing about the rollout.

Platform integration

OKRs don’t live in isolation. Here’s how they connect the whole platform.

The OKR module was the foundation. But the reason it changed how the company worked wasn’t the goals themselves. It was what happened when those goals connected to everything else.

A target set in January only matters if the work being done in September is still pointed at it. In a regulated utility, that means the capital project in one directorate, the field crew schedule in another, and the performance conversation a manager is having with a supervisor all need to tie back to the same thing. Profit.co makes that connection explicit, not assumed.

The results

A year in, the strategy meetings felt different. The hallway conversations did too.

A year after rollout, the team running the programme sat down to take stock. Reporting cycles had collapsed. Regulator queries weren’t dragging on for weeks anymore. Check-ins were getting done. Good signs, all of them.

But the bigger change was harder to measure and easier to feel. People talked about the company’s commitments out loud. Not just in the executive committee. In network depots. In customer service teams. In the asset planning office. The regulatory plan had stopped being a document and started being a thing people referred to in the course of their actual work.

That’s what the platform really did. It didn’t change the strategy. The strategy was always fine. It just made the strategy reachable from wherever you happened to be standing.

What the broader industry sees