🤝 ✅ Cross-departmental collaboration via OKR Roadmap in Jira: Overview and tool comparison

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Project management is a complex job where you often have to juggle multiple teams with their own Objectives. And the more people are involved, the harder it is to keep everyone on the same page and aligned around the same final goal. However, if you already use OKRs and have an experience with roadmaps, we have a solution for you — OKR Roadmaps.

This solution was initially developed for one of our customers. They had a massive worldwide operation in a turbulent market and needed a way for multiple people to keep a bird’s eye view of the entire project. Moreover, they needed an efficient solution, ideally not adding any overhead on the management side. Since they were already using OKR Board for Jira, they asked us about their options, and the OKR Roadmaps were born.

In this article, we will explain the entire process behind the OKR Roadmaps and showcase popular Jira plugins you can use to implement them.

WHAT ARE OKRS?

OKRs is the most well-researched and proven-to-work performance management framework. They are based on the Management by Objectives and represent over 70 years of evolution in performance management practices. And while other frameworks might work better for some particular team — for example, Spotify found great success with Bets’ Boards —  OKRs are still better for most companies.

If you want to learn more about OKRs, we’ve got an awesome 16-minute video breakdown of everything you need to know!

WHAT IS A ROADMAP?

A roadmap is a way to present a multi-stage process on paper across a time interval. The Gantt chart is the most common form of a roadmap, which you can see right below this paragraph. At the beginning of the XX century, it revolutionized time management and has been relevant ever since. 

Source: Wikimedia

Atlassian has a great article that goes more in-depth on Gantt charts — What are Gantt charts?

However, let’s be honest — no plan survives contact with the enemy, and no roadmap will be 100% correct. This is where OKRs come in with the OKR check-ins, allowing you to easily determine at what stage of the process your company is. And once you combine OKR progress reports with the roadmap, you get the ultimate project management tool — OKR Roadmap.

WHAT IS OKR ROADMAP?

OKR Roadmap projects your OKR completion score onto your traditional roadmap, giving otherwise unavailable clarity and transparency to your company’s procedures.

Here’s what they might look like:

Source: OKR Roadmap in OKR Board for Jira by Oboard

With this screenshot, you can easily see what every team member is supposed to be doing and how well they are doing it. So you can quickly determine that, for example, Julia will be very busy till the end of the quarter, while Malcolm and Demian have dedicated time for tasks that are not a part of their OKRs and might be more available. You can also see the progress statuses on their OKRs and can easily determine how far ahead they are right now.

We can take it even further by linking Jira tasks with OKRs and automating the reporting process. Then the OKR progress will update the second a Jira task — or subtask — is closed. For example, if an Objective is to develop a new software feature, and your Development team has an Epic with tasks related to this Objective, you can link this Epic and automatically see how far along they are. This does not remove the need for traditional OKR reporting since you still lack the info on their blockers and insights, but it is better than pulling the team into a meeting every time you need new data.

If you are working as a project manager, you already know how awesome this is. And yet it can still be better. After all, you could put all Departments on the OKR Roadmap at once.

OKR ROADMAP AS A TOOL FOR CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL COLLABORATION

One of the key points of the OKR Framework is transparency. Sure, every employee in your company doesn’t need to know what precisely other departments are doing, but they should be aware of their overall direction. This promotes cooperation and often provides innovative ideas that are only obvious from a different perspective.

And this is exactly what the OKR Roadmap achieves. By adding all of your Departments’ to the same OKR Roadmap, you create a project management tool that can easily showcase what is happening all across the company. Just one look — and suddenly, your DevOps team knows that the Marketing team is expecting a large influx of new customers soon. And now they know they should hasten their plans to upgrade the server infrastructure to handle that spike.

Source: OKR Roadmap in OKR Board for Jira by Oboard

For a more painful example, let’s look at the screenshot above. It features a dramatic recreation of a real-life case that convinced one of our customers to try the OKR Roadmaps. The company was preparing for a launch of a big project, which was set for the beginning of Q2 — so the marketing team was purchasing advertisements, sponsoring the influencers, and overall burning their budget down to create hype. Except, the project suffered an unexpected delay and had to be postponed. Which would be fine by itself, but due to the overall panic, somebody forgot to tell the marketing team about that. So the advertisements still went up, and influencers still hyped up the product, but there was no product to be found.

Granted, this situation showcases multiple points of failure — and our OKR consultants worked hard to completely redesign that company’s management structure to prevent it from happening again. However, a cross-departmental OKR Roadmap would have stopped this situation at its root — it would take the Marketing team-lead just one look to realize that something was wrong.

OVERVIEW OF CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL OKR ROADMAPS IN JIRA TOOLS

As mentioned, OKR Roadmaps is an unconventional concept. Still, we picked several popular road-mapping tools to allow you to implement them in Jira. Some of them won’t have your roadmaps synced with OKRs, so it isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison, but they will still let you create a usable project roadmap.

OKR Board for Jira

Source: OKR Roadmap in OKR Board for Jira by Oboard

Developer: Oboard

Price: $0.10–1.50 per user/month

Link: OKR Board for Jira

OKR Board for Jira is a powerful software platform that integrates OKRs into the Atlassian ecosystem, allowing you to link up Jira tasks with OKRs and automatically report their status. It is the #1 OKR software on the Atlassian Marketplace and has been recently selected as the Editor’s Pick.

OKR Board features cross-project OKR Roadmaps — a Gantt chart combined with the OKR progress that can pull OKRs from different Jira projects. And since OKR Board for Jira allows you to link Jira Issues to OKRs, you can quickly edit both the OKRs and the Jira issues from the board — for example, to change the OKR progress weights or make some last-minute adjustments.

It is also the software that you’ve seen throughout this article. It perfectly represents our vision for the OKR Roadmaps, and its excellent features power them up even further. With OKR Board for Jira, you get:

• OKR Roadmaps reaching across Projects, Departments, and Workspaces;
• Customizable OKR Dashboards and one-click executive reports;
• Automated reporting and check-ins;
• Deep Confluence integration via free OKR Board for Confluence add-on;
• Custom OKR breakdown periods: Year>Quarter>Month;
• Custom OKR levels: Company, Department, Group, etc.;
• Custom OKR weights and types: Binary, Number, Percentile;
• Public and private Workspaces with user roles;
• Notifications and reminders inside Jira;
• Public Oboard OKR API for data export.

OKR Board for Jira presents the winning OKR Roadmap solution the way we see it — however, it is not the only one. 

Jira Advanced Roadmaps

Source: Atlassian 

Developer: Atlassian

Price: From $7.75 per user/month

Link: Jira Roadmaps

If you want a native Atlassian solution for the project roadmap, Jira Advanced Roadmaps might be perfect for you. They are not based on Objectives and Key Results, and instead use Epics and Issues to form the structure of your project. Although, if you want to, you can use them to represent Objectives and Key Results accordingly and have an impromptu OKR roadmap.

It is an extremely solid solution that can be used well as long as all of your teams are in the same Jira project. If they are not — for example, you have separate projects for Marketing and Engineering — you will have to compromise with separate roadmaps and lose some transparency. 

Alternatively, you’ll have to take a look at Jira Align.

Jira Align

Source: Atlassian 

Developer: Atlassian

Price: From $27 000/year

Link: Jira Align

Align is the premium Jira module by Atlassian, meant to significantly power up enterprise operations. Among its many features, it has an even more powerful road-mapping engine and initial support for OKRs — although there is no way to put them on the roadmap just yet.

The one standout feature of Jira Align is the ability to reach across Jira projects on the same instance and add their Epics and Issues to one roadmap. If you are aiming for a full-company alignment, we can not understate how important it is. 

Additionally, Align’s roadmaps are extremely customizable, so you can add all the information you can need to the single view. So if you are already using Align, a cross-project roadmap will be an excellent addition to your project management arsenal.

Structure.Gantt

Source: Tempo Software

Developer: Tempo Software

Pricing: $0.03–$2.78 per user/month for Structure + $0.01–$0.95 per user/month for Gantt

Link: Atlassian Marketplace

Structure is an extremely popular portfolio software by Tempo that greatly simplifies enterprise-scale project management. And if you are already familiar with it, you can use an add-on called Structure. Gantt to add roadmaps to it.

The same distinction still applies — you can make a roadmap, but you can not make an OKR roadmap yet. Even though Structure has an excellent Confluence plugin for OKRs, it can not be synced with your roadmap. Other than that, Structure. Gantt is a perfectly viable solution. 

BigGantt

Source: Appfire

Developer: Appfire

Pricing: $0.01–$1.31 per user/month

Link: Atlassian Marketplace

BigGantt is a flexible and powerful road-mapping software for Jira. Unlike other tools on this list, it focuses only on roadmaps, and its implementation is flexible and easy to use.

That said, it does not support OKRs and you will have to use Epics and Issues to represent them. You can still implement cross-project roadmaps this way, but you do miss out on having all the features in the same tool. Otherwise, BigGantt fits the requirements perfectly.

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To sum it all up, if you want to implement a project or cross-project Roadmap, you have several options. 

• If you want a dedicated OKR Roadmap, you should go with OKR Board for Jira;
• If you want a native Jira solution, Jira Advanced Roadmaps is your choice — while Align is better for companies with multiple Jira Projects;
• If you are already using flexible road-mapping software with Jira integration, you can use that too. 

The final choice of the solution is completely up to you — all the tools we listed above are competent, powerful, and save a lot of time compared to manual reporting. As long as you understand the core principles of cross-project Roadmaps, you really can’t go wrong with any of them.

CONCLUSION

In the right hands, OKR Roadmaps are an extremely powerful project management tool that can save time and resources. We consider it essential for any business with multiple Departments and projects, and our enterprise customers love how it makes large project management effortless.

If you need a more specific solution tailored directly to your business needs — book a call with Oboard OKR Consulting team and we'll build one for you. And if you need a live demonstration of the OKR Roadmap capabilities, you can book a demo too.

We hope that this article has been helpful to you — or, at the very least, you’ll give OKR Roadmaps an honest try before you dismiss it as a crazy idea. Because while the setup requires a lot of work, the result will change how you look at project management forever. And if you are still unconvinced or have questions — talk to us!