Roll up goal progress from sub-goals - coming soon!

[#1]

Hi community,

We're excited to share an update that gives you more control over how progress is tracked in Atlassian Goals.

Many of you use deep, cascading goal hierarchies to align your organisation. With the recent launch of Goal Types, a goal's progress was calculated only from its direct success measures which made it difficult to track parent goals that primarily roll up from their sub-goals. We’ve heard your feedback, and rollups are now more flexible.

What's changing?

You can now choose the source of progress for each goal:

• Roll up from success measures (existing) - progress is the average of all success measures linked to this goal.

• Roll up from sub-goals (new) - progress is the average of all sub-goals nested under this goal.

Good to know:

• Progress always comes from the metrics on your success measures (e.g. "1,000 signups"). Sub-goals don't have their own metrics; they reflect the progress of what's underneath them.

• When you choose Roll up from sub-goals, you'll still need success measures attached somewhere further down the tree. If a branch has no success measures anywhere underneath it, that branch will show 0%.

Why we're making this change

You told us that for top-level strategic goals, success is often best reflected by the sub-goals beneath them rather than success measures. This update lets your progress match how you actually structure your goals, no matter how deep your hierarchy goes.

What do I need to do?

We will roll out this update over the next week, so you will see it on your site soon.

Nothing changes for your existing goals - they'll keep rolling up from success measures unless you choose to switch.

If you'd prefer a parent goal to track progress via its sub-goals:

1. Navigate to the goal.

2. Click the settings (cog) icon next to the progress bar.

3. Select Sub-goals as your rollup source.

FAQs

Q: Can I roll up from both success measures and sub-goals at the same time?
A: Not yet - for now you'll need to choose one or the other. We're considering hybrid options for a future release. If this is something you'd like to see, please share your use case with us in the comments to help us better understand your needs.

Q: Will this change my existing progress percentages?
A: No. All existing goals will keep their current rollup source. You'll also see a warning before any rollup change is saved, so nothing changes unexpectedly.

Q: Are archived goals included in the rollup?
A: No. Archived goals are excluded from the progress rollup.

Q: Can I change the rollup source later?
A: Yes - you can switch back and forth at any time from the same settings menu.

Q: What if my sub-goals don't have any success measures attached?

A: The parent will show 0%, because progress always originates from success measures. To use sub-goal rollup, make sure success measures are attached somewhere further down the tree.

We'd love your feedback

We'd love to hear how this works for you - and what you'd like to see next.

Thank you for being part of the Goals community and helping us build a better product.

- The Atlassian Goals team

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Nice! Thanks for this 🙌

Probably going to try this out in the following days (or once it's rolled out) to see how it looks like :)

[Peter Scobie]

Looks good and very relevant for me. Don't see the settings cog to change this so assume it hasn't been deployed yet.

[Dave Mathijs]

Thanks for sharing @Nicola Sun The Goals app is getting more mature with these new capabilities.

I'd love to see the ability to delete goals alltogether (tests, errors, ...) instead of just archiving them.

[Stephen_Lugton]

Hi @Nicola Sun 

In your previous post about Goal Types and Success Measures, you shared this graphic to clarify how sub-goals and success measures could roll up:

This hybrid approach would be much more useful to us as the approach of only being able to use sub-goals OR success metrics means that if we have a number of department level success measures we would have to create an extra sub-goal to contain those department level success measures that would then place them at the same hierarchal level as team level sub-goals, which they are not. 

A Hybrid approach would also provide an easy at a glance view of whether a success measure was at the department level or the team level.

[Nicola Sun]

Thanks for your feedback @Stephen_Lugton , I've added it to our backlog to help prioritise hybrid rollups.