Orchestrating Outcomes with Oboard OKRs and Portfolio Management in Structure by Tempo

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It’s truly fascinating how many exciting setups we can create by mixing marketplace apps together. So this story will showcase one of the ecosystem power couples - Structure by Tempo and Oboard  🎯

And before jumping in - huge kudos to Marek Lewandowski, lead Atlassian Consultant at GeniusGecko, who co-created this article together with us 👏

So, leadership teams constantly strive to connect ambitious strategic objectives and the daily flurry of operational tasks. While OKRs help as a framework, their true potential is unlocked when they are seamlessly integrated with daily work — and that's where solutions for Jira like Structure come in.

Oboard’s Jira OKR app stands out as an advanced solution for OKR management within the Atlassian ecosystem. What makes it particularly powerful is its ability to work on top of existing PPM tools like Structure by Tempo (also referred to as Tempo Structure).

By using them together, you get a transparent, accountable, and actionable framework for strategic execution and resource optimization, leveraging the robust project and portfolio management capabilities while adding a sophisticated OKR layer.

Understanding OKRs: A Framework for Ambitious People and Goals

Before diving into the tools, let’s ensure we’re aligned on the OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) framework itself.

• Objectives (O): These are qualitative, ambitious, and clearly defined goals that state what you want to achieve. They should be inspirational, memorable, and aligned with your broader vision. An Objective might be "Delight Our Customers" or "Become the Market Leader."
  
  
• Key Results (KR): These are quantitative, measurable outcomes that define how you will achieve your Objective. They answer the question: "How will we know if we've achieved our Objective?" Key Results are typically numerical, such as "Increase customer satisfaction score (CSAT) from 80% to 90%" or "Capture 25% market share." They should be challenging but achievable, and their progress must be easily trackable.

OKRs are typically set quarterly and help organizations align their efforts, focus on priorities, and track progress toward challenging goals.

OKRs vs. KPIs: Two Sides of the Performance Coin

While both are vital for measuring performance, OKRs and KPIs serve different but complementary purposes:

Feature	KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)	OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
Primary Purpose	Monitor the health of an ongoing business process or activity.	Drive change and achieve ambitious new outcomes.
What it Tells You	How well something is currently performing.	Where you're going and how you'll get there; about moving the needle significantly.
Nature	Reactive/Descriptive; gauges on a dashboard.	Proactive/Aspirational; setting a destination and defining the path.
Focus	Current performance and operational health.	Strategic breakthroughs, significant improvement, and pushing the organization forward.
Examples	- Website traffic	- Objective: Dominate the market with unparalleled customer delight.
	- Customer churn rate	- Key Result: Increase customer satisfaction score from X to Y.
	- Sales revenue (as a steady metric)	- Key Result: Achieve $10 million in new sales revenue for product Z by Q2 2025.
	- Average resolution time	- Key Result: Reduce average customer support resolution time by 30%.
Relationship	You monitor KPIs to understand current performance.	You set OKRs to improve those KPIs or achieve new strategic breakthroughs. A KPI can be a metric within a Key Result.

In essence, you monitor KPIs to understand current performance and set OKRs to improve them or achieve new strategic breakthroughs.

Oboard for Jira: Making Strategy Measurable and Traceable

Oboard serves as your central hub for defining, cascading, and tracking your strategic goals directly within your Jira instance. It empowers you to:

• Define and Link Measurable OKRs: Clearly articulate company, team, and individual objectives, each underpinned by quantifiable key results. This isn't just about setting goals; it's about making them countable and directly connecting them to the work that drives progress.

• Trace Outcomes to Execution: This is a critical differentiator. OKR Board allows you to link specific Jira issues (Epics, Stories, Initiatives) directly to your Key Results. As your teams complete these issues, the progress of your Key Results is automatically updated in real-time. This provides an unbreakable chain of traceability, allowing you to see how every completed task contributes to a larger strategic outcome.

• Drive Adoption Through Familiarity: By embedding OKR management directly within Jira, where your teams already work and into Structure for Jira hierarchies, OKR Board significantly lowers the barrier to adoption. Teams don't need to switch contexts or learn new tools, fostering a natural integration of strategic thinking into their daily routines.

• Visualize and Measure Progress: Intuitive roadmaps and customizable dashboards transform complex data into clear, actionable insights. You gain real-time visibility into your strategic health, identifying what's on track, what needs attention, and precisely measuring the progress of your strategic initiatives.

The Strategic Blueprint: Unlocking Capacity Planning with Structure by Tempo

The challenge for many organizations is translating high-level strategic objectives (OKRs) into actionable, trackable work in Jira. While Oboard excels at tracing progress, Structure by Tempo provides the essential hierarchical framework to bridge this gap, enabling true strategic control and resource allocation.

Building a Unified Hierarchy from OKRs to Tasks

Structure transforms Jira data into dynamic, multi-level hierarchies, allowing you to organize, aggregate, and visualize work across multiple projects and teams. The integration with OKR Board unlocks groundbreaking capabilities by allowing you to create a single, decomposed hierarchy that flows directly from strategy to execution:

• Clearly Communicating Vision & Outcomes: You can build a living strategic roadmap directly within Structure. Your Objectives and Key Results from the OKR Board become the top tiers of your hierarchy. Beneath them, you organize the underlying Jira Epics, Initiatives, and Stories that contribute directly to each Key Result. This immediately and visually communicates your strategic vision and the direct outcomes you aim to achieve, ensuring everyone understands how their work contributes to the bigger picture.

Tempo's OKR Board and Structure offers robust integration capabilities, significantly enhancing how teams can track and manage their OKRs directly within Jira. By leveraging specialized Jira Query Language (JQL) functions, users gain granular control and visibility. For instance, OKRworkspaceKey and OKRworkspaceName allow for filtering issues based on the specific OKR workspaces they are linked to, while OKRcycleTitle helps narrow down results by the relevant OKR cycle. Deeper insights into the hierarchical structure of OKRs are provided through OKRparentId, OKRparentLabel, OKRparentTitle, OKRparentOwner, and OKRparentGroup, enabling teams to query issues based on their linked Objectives or Key Results and their respective attributes. Furthermore, OKRowner and OKRgroup facilitate precise filtering based on the owners and assigned groups of the specific OKR links within Jira issues, streamlining reporting and analysis. This comprehensive suite of JQL functions empowers teams to create highly customized dashboards and reports, ensuring that OKR progress is always transparent and actionable within their existing Jira workflows.

Strategic vs. Operational Grouping for Capacity Planning

This unified hierarchy is a game-changer for capacity planning. By leveraging Jira's powerful JQL (Jira Query Language) within Structure for Jira, you can create generators that group issues not just by project or team, but by their strategic relevance. For instance, you can define a custom field in Jira to mark issues as "Strategic Initiative" or "Operational Maintenance." Structure can then aggregate effort and time spent on these distinct categories within your hierarchy. This enables critical insight for portfolio management Jira processes: how much capacity goes to strategic initiatives vs operational maintenance.

This empowers you to answer critical questions: How much of our current capacity is focused on executing strategic initiatives versus maintaining existing operations? This direct insight is vital for rebalancing resources and ensuring you're allocating sufficient time and effort to your most critical strategic objectives.

Prioritize, Focus, and Control Strategy Execution

By clearly segmenting strategic work within this singular hierarchy, you can easily identify and prioritize issues that directly contribute to your customer-focused strategy. This ensures teams are always focused on delivering value aligned with top-level goals, not just busily working on the next task.

This integrated view provides a powerful mechanism to control the execution of your strategy. If you see a strategic Key Result lagging, you can immediately drill down in Structure to identify the contributing Jira issues, assess dependencies, and reallocate resources or adjust priorities to get back on track.

Stay Informed with Powerful Notifications and Enterprise-Grade Features

When it comes to keeping your team informed and engaged, the OKR Board for Jira offers robust notification features. Users can stay updated through in-app and email notifications for @mentions and replies to their comments, ensuring timely collaboration. Furthermore, the "All comments" feature keeps Owners and Stakeholders in the loop by notifying them about every comment left on their OKRs. For critical updates, the "Manual Status update" notification alerts Owners and Stakeholders whenever an OKR's status is manually changed. For larger organizations, the Enterprise features provide even more control and flexibility. The Data Center compatibility ensures seamless operation for on-premise Jira instances, while the Public API allows for deep integration and customization, empowering teams to extend the plugin's functionality to meet their unique requirements. Finally, dedicated consulting services are available to help companies onboard and effectively adapt to the OKR methodology, ensuring a smooth and successful implementation.

C-Level Insights: Transparent, Accountable, and Quick Reports

Executives gain a unified view combining strategic OKRs with operational work — powered by Structure by Tempo, leveraging Atlassian Structure functionality to generate dashboards and real-time reporting.

One of the most significant challenges for C-level executives is getting accurate, digestible, and timely reports on strategic progress without drowning in operational detail. The OKR Board and Structure integration is specifically designed to address this, providing the reports you need:

• Unique Strategic & Operational KPI Dashboards: While many "goals" or "roadmapping" tools offer limited visibility, this integration allows for the creation of truly custom dashboards that combine strategic OKR progress (from OKR Board) with operational capacity and effort allocation (from Structure). This unified view, often missing in other tools, provides a holistic picture of performance against your vision and mission, integrating actual execution KPIs with strategic progress.
  
  
  
  

• Transparency at Every Level: Because progress rolls up from Jira issues through Key Results to Objectives, and capacity is visible across strategic and operational buckets, the entire organization operates with unprecedented transparency. Everyone understands the "why" behind the "what."

• Enabling Accountability: The direct linking of work to outcomes and the clear visibility of progress foster a culture of accountability. Teams and individuals can clearly see their contribution, and leaders can quickly identify areas that need support or re-prioritization.

• Quick to Prepare, High-Value Reports: Gone are the days of manual data aggregation and spreadsheet juggling. With real-time updates and customizable views, C-level reports on strategic progress, resource allocation, and key performance indicators can be generated rapidly, providing the timely insights needed for agile decision-making. Regular OKR Check-ins are also streamlined, offering quick status updates within the integrated framework.

The Path to Strategic Accountability and Agility

The combination of OKR Board for Jira by Oboard and Structure by Tempo is more than just a set of tools; it's a strategic operating system. By integrating OKRs with Atlassian Structure capabilities, organizations achieve traceability, agility, and clarity — maximizing strategic outcomes in portfolio management Jira workflows. It transforms the often-abstract concept of strategy into a tangible, measurable, and controllable execution plan. By providing unparalleled traceability of outcomes, granular insights into resource allocation, and a unified view for C-level reporting, this integration drives improved focus, enhances strategic agility, and ultimately empowers your organization to achieve its most ambitious goals with confidence and clarity.