Multiple Parent Goals

[Patrick Quirk]

Hi, is it currently possible to have multiple parent goals for a goal? 

For example, we are wanting to use Atlas to track OKRs with a setup as follows:

Company Objectives 

Team Objectives

Team Key Results

Given the way company objectives were defined, we'll have team goals that contribute to multiple company objectives. (Example: One IT solution that meets the needs of multiple company departments)

It isn't possible to change how company objectives are defined at this time, but we'd like to be able to associate the key results with all applicable objectives instead of having to create multiple instances of the same key result under each applicable objective.

[Aaron Morris · Accepted solution]

This is an idea for a non-ideal workaround...

Assuming you don't have too many company-level objectives, you could create one tag for each objective.  Then you could assign those tags to the team-level objectives.  Then when it's time to update the status of a company-level objective, you could filter on it's tag to quickly see the team-level objectives that support it.

An example hierarchy of goals might look like this:

• Company Objective 1
• Company Objective 2
• Company Objective 3
• Team A Objective 1  (tags: company-objective-1)
  • Key Result A1.1
  • Key Result A1.2
• Team A Objective 2 (tags: company-objective-1, company objective-2) 
  • Key Result A2.1
  • Key Result A2.2
• Team B Objective 1 (tags: company-objective-3)
  • Key Result B1.1
  • Key Result B1.2
• Team B Objective 2 (tags: company-objective-1, company-objective-3)
  • Key Result B2.1
  • Key Result B2.2

Again, not ideal...but it is one potential option for creating a many-to-many relationship between company goals and team goals.

[Patrick Quirk]

Thanks, Aaron. This seems to be the best workaround at this point in time. Would be great if the functionality to associated parent goals allowed for a multi-select. 

[Allan Maxwell]

I do not believe it is possible in the Jira Align. 

In an ideal world, each goal would be created within the context of contributing to a single, "preexisting" parent goal.  In reality, we are often ask to tie what we are already working to a "new" set of goals established at a higher level.  In this reality, we typically find that almost everything we are working on (whether goal or epic or other) could potentially be seen as contributing to almost any of the new set of higher goals.  I would just chose the closet match.