Implementing an OKR framework in Jira

David Winn

I'm doing research to see how our company might be more efficient in tracking our OKRs directly in Jira.  We currently are manually tracking progress on OKRs in a big spreadsheet, which requires maintenance and is a bit cumbersome for creating visualizations on progress.  I've found 2 App add ons that seem promising to help us to more efficiently associate our Jira work (amongst EPICs and Stories across various departmental projects) directly to Key Results and their parent Objectives: OKR for Jira (from Appfire) and OKR Board for Jira (from Oboard,inc).  Anyone have hands on experience using either of these tools that could help with my understanding of the value you're getting from your implementation.  Maybe willing to share your lessons learned (dos and donts)??  Thanks!

Dave

 

Oleksii Marynych

Hey, David! Full disclosure - I am from Oboard, so that I may be biased. However, this is exactly why we made OKR Board for Jira in the first place - spreadsheets are just inefficient, take way too much time to manage, and become horrifying at scale.

From our experience with implementing OKR Board for Jira, switching to a dedicated OKR platform simplifies the OKR managing process. The most significant benefit is that you can directly link all your JIRA Epics and Tasks to your Objectives or Key Results and have them updated in real-time.

We also optimize the reporting process with real-time Dashboards - you can just put a link to one in your executive report, and it will contain all the data you need. (by the way, we have a free OKR Board for Confluence macros) You also get a lot of flexibility in terms of transparency and access levels - with private workspaces and roles, you can design OKRs for more sensitive projects and not have them be public knowledge.

I can go on and on with other features like Cross-project OKR Roadmap or Custom OKR weights. Ultimately, the choice is up to you, but I highly recommend you set up a trial for the OKR Board and give it a shot. We can provide you with a demo with all the OKR Board for Jira features and explain how they will help you manage your OKRs. Also, feel free to ask any questions you have. I'll be happy to answer.