🎯 Give Your OKRs a Sanity Check with Capacity Planning 📊

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Ambitious OKRs are great, but only as long as you have the capacity to execute them effectively. Without proper resource planning, what you imagine to be achievable can easily become unrealistic and demotivating. That’s why it’s crucial to align OKRs with team capacity.

Combining the Best Strategy Planning Tools

Executing strategy on smaller-scale projects can be complicated, but the moment you start talking about hundreds of employees and dozens of departments organized around the common goal — welcome to Hell. Misaligned timelines, inconsistent tracking, and communication gaps kill the projects via a thousand cuts, introducing scope creep, delays, and mismanagement.

However, you can solve this problem with just two Jira apps:

• ActivityTimeline: Plan team capacity effectively, ensuring that your team has the right resources for each task.
• Oboard: OKR Board, KPI Reporting and Check-ins for Jira: Set, track, and achieve strategic goals with a dedicated board that keeps your team focused.

Now, let’s have a glimpse of how you can use OKR Board for Jira and ActivityTimeline to improve productivity of your teams.

Integrating Oboard and ActivityTimeline for Seamless Execution

ActivityTimeline provides invaluable insights into the current situation “on the ground”, giving you an easy view of your team’s availability and current capacity. Oboard, on the other hand, provides a bigger picture and gives you a complete breakdown of your strategy, how it connects with your execution, and what progress has been made toward the strategic goals. Together, they give you a complete picture of where your company is going, how it is doing, and whether it is capable of getting there faster.

Here’s a 5-step guide on how to use both apps to their maximum effectiveness.

Step 1: Define Clear and Measurable OKRs 

Tool: Oboard

OKR, as the name suggests, consist of Objectives and Key Results. An Objective is a big, ambitious goal that you want to achieve. It should come from your project’s Vision and Mission statement and represent the goal of your work for the next OKR period. If you are familiar with Scrum, think of Objectives as your Sprint Goals — only the Sprint is about three months long.

Key Result is a metric used to measure your progress toward achieving the Objective. While Objectives can be abstract, Key Results should always be represented by hard numbers — a.k.a. be measurable, clear, easy to understand, and actionable.

Finally, Objectives and Key Results are about change. If something is already working, then keeping it as is or even slightly improving it should not be an OKR — it does not require much additional effort or extra motivation. For example, if you are already selling 500 software licenses per month, selling 550 is not exactly ambitious. Selling 1 000, however, is a worthy goal to rally your team around. 

So, to sum it all up — OKRs should be clear, measurable, ambitious, yet attainable. For example, here is what a set of Engineering OKRs looks like in Oboard.

To learn more about setting OKRs and the common pitfalls involved, check out How to Write OKRs on the Oboard blog.

Step 2: Break Down OKRs into Actionable Tasks and Link Them to Jira Issues

Tool: Oboard

 

A Company OKR is your North Star — it tells you where to go, but it does not explain to you how to get there. That is entirely up to the individual teams, and that’s why each OKR should ideally be broken down to their level and aligned with the departments own Objectives.

That is not an easy task — we have an entire longread dedicated specifically to that. However, the general idea is to have a set of yearly Company OKRs, from which the Departments will build off their own quarterly OKRs, which in turn will be broken down into actionable Jira issues. For example, here’s how a Company OKR can be broken down to the department-level Jira Stories:

NOTE: The picture above is not an illustration — it is a real-time OKR Board that you can find in the OKR Board for Jira.

In Oboard, these Jira Stories can even later be used to track the Objective’s completion score, but we will talk about this in a later section. For now, it’s time to hand off these Jira tasks into ActivityTimeline, to ensure that our team has enough capacity to achieve these strategic goals.

Step 3: Assess Current Team Capacity

Tool: ActivityTimeline

Setting ambitious OKRs is one thing. Ensuring your team can actually deliver on them is another. This is where ActivityTimeline transforms your Jira environment into a dynamic, visual dashboard of your team’s capacity, making it easy to see who’s overloaded, who’s underutilized, and who’s just right.

ActivityTimeline’s intuitive interface provides an immediate view of your team’s availability. Each team member appears on a timeline, their schedule color-coded to indicate their workload status — green for available, yellow for partially booked, and red for fully occupied. This simple visual system makes it instantly clear who has the capacity to take on new tasks and who doesn’t.

With a few clicks, you can dive deeper. Hover over a team member’s timeline to view their active tasks, complete with details on time estimates and actual hours logged. It’s a real-time view of who is working on what, making it far easier to balance workloads.

Filters allow you to view team capacity by skill set or department, a must-have for larger teams. If you’re managing cross-functional teams, this feature helps ensure the right people are assigned to the right tasks. For organizations juggling multiple projects, this clarity is a game changer. ActivityTimeline even highlights conflicts — like double-booked team members — giving you a chance to resolve them before they become problems.

Capacity planning is too often a guessing game. ActivityTimeline turns it into a data-driven process. Teams can forecast their capacity for future periods, simulate different workload scenarios, and see exactly how new OKRs will impact their existing commitments.

Step 4: Adjust Task Assignments and Timelines Based on Capacity Insights

Tool: ActivityTimeline

Capacity is just the starting point. Even with a clear view of who is available, balancing the workload is where the real challenge begins. ActivityTimeline’s drag-and-drop functionality makes this process intuitive. Need to reassign a task? Just grab it and drop it on another team member. Need to adjust a task’s timeline? Stretch or shrink it directly on the calendar.

Overloading your top performers may yield short-term gains, but it leads to burnout and turnover. ActivityTimeline helps avoid this by letting you set maximum work hours for each team member. This way, you can’t accidentally overbook anyone.

Managers can also split large tasks across multiple team members. For instance, if a key result in your OKRs requires a major marketing campaign, you can assign different parts of that campaign — content creation, design, and distribution — to the right specialists.

As tasks evolve and new priorities emerge, you can continue to balance workload in real time. 

Step 5: Monitor Progress with a Custom Dashboard and Resource Utilization Report

Tool: Oboard and ActivityTimeline

Custom Dashboards are one of Oboard’s most powerful tools, allowing you to zero in on the most critical OKRs and KPIs. They enable you to create a real-time report that focuses precisely on the progress towards goals that matter most, such as top-priority strategic objectives.

Meanwhile, the Resource Utilization Forecast in ActivityTimeline acts as your command center for capacity analysis. It shows how your team is spending their time, broken down by task, team member, or project. Want to know how much time was spent on OKR-related tasks? Done. Curious about which team members are consistently overbooked? That’s there too.

Combined, Oboard’s Custom Dashboard and ActivityTimeline’s Resource Utilization Report provide you with both the current state of the project and the reasoning why it is currently in this state. They make identifying potential bottlenecks and resolving them much easier than the built-in Jira solution, offering insights that you simply won’t find elsewhere.

Conclusion

OKRs shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. To ensure success, organizations must align strategic goals with actual capacity. By combining Oboard’s OKR management with ActivityTimeline’s resource planning, Jira users can bridge the gap between strategy and execution.

Try Oboard: OKR Board, KPI Reporting and Check-ins for Jira (free for 30 days) or use it free for up to 10 users

Try ActivityTimeline for Jira for free during a 30-day trial period

This article is a joint effort between Reliex and Oboard – we are happy to share our combined knowledge with you.