Introducing an improved OKR experience for Jira Align

[#1]

Hi Community! 

My name is Sam Ugulava and I am a Senior Product Manager working on Jira Align. I spent my first ~2 years at Atlassian working on Confluence Cloud, but made the move over to Enterprise Agility in October where I now lead our Planning & Execution group.

One of the first projects I took over was our public roadmap commitment to improve our OKR experience. This enhancement has been part of an Early Access Program (EAP), but is now available to all customers. 

I know updating training material and implementing changes like this across your organization takes a lot of work, so please reach out to your TAM if you would like to have this feature turned on for your instance. 

The new OKR hub gives users an updated experience for creating and viewing OKRs by bringing goals and OKRs together and showing the relationships between them and their children objectives.

We've made enhancements to our table, including the ability to customize the column widths so it's easy for you to view the most important information to you. If you leave or refresh the page, your table will look the same when you come back now that we've added local saving into the grid.

Now that we've reached this milestone, I'd like to give a preview of our plans for further enhancements to Objectives overall. We have added a new item to the public roadmap with a commitment to making it quick and easy to create and edit more types of objectives, and track their progress and context. 

This work will be broken down into three milestones:

MILESTONE 1
Track objectives
Improve the table and slide out, removing the noise, adding missing data (like SAFe objectives, milestone objectives, etc), and making it easy for users to find and view the most important information so that they can track progress against their goals.

MILESTONE 2
Create & edit objectives
Make it quick and easy to create and edit all types of objectives by addressing friction points with APIs, import, and manual workflows

MILESTONE 3
Understand objectives
Improve the way objective owners and stakeholders communicate by providing opportunities to share context while scoring objectives and surfacing the information stakeholders need to make decisions to help them achieve their goals.

I'm excited to go on this journey with you all and look forward to partnering with you over the coming quarters as we take on these next milestones! 

[Karan Shah]

What is an OKR?

[Julia Holovko - Oboard - OKR Board for Jira _ Confluence]

Hi @Karan Shah , 

an OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, a framework that helps companies set and achieve ambitious goals. It involves setting specific, measurable, and time-bound objectives, and breaking them down into key results that are tracked and evaluated regularly.

If you're interested in learning more about OKRs, here are a few helpful resources:

1) "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr - a book that provides a comprehensive overview of OKRs. Here is a dedicated website with useful resources.

2) Atlassian's great comparison of OKR vs KPI framework.

3) OKR examples for developers and software engineers. 

Cheers!

[shauclar]

@Sam Ugulava Would you have any insight into how someone could implement an approvals process in Jira Align.   We have a large scale implementation at Cisco ONEx and need to route from Intake to the Epics Portfolio level and need to approve epics prior to handing them to engineering teams to break down features/epics in Jira Cloud.

Do you have any roadmap for a feature set in Jira Align upcoming over the next year?  I'm aware of the safe harbor caveats.

[Bijal Patel]

Hi, I have a question when mapping Jira and Jira Align: In the pic below, for example its clear that Epics in Jira Core becomes Features in Jira Align; but what Jira Core levels becomes in purple boxes? In other words, which levels (issues types) in Jira Core become Mission, Vision, Values, Strategies, Goals, Themes, Epics and Capabilities. 
I was wondering if I can get a Data Dictionary that describe these Jira align issue Types?

Thank you in advance.

[Puja Rathi]

@Bijal Patel the items in purple on the right don't get synced with Jira from Jira Align. Those items should be managed in Jira Align.

You can check glossary on Jira Align - https://help.jiraalign.com/hc/en-us/articles/13170459905172-Glossary#h_01GS5Y1ENQRATPK1JTMRA9MTJ9

Detailed field dictionary- https://help.jiraalign.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055682751-Field-dictionary

[Michael Holian]

Hi @Sam Ugulava - I really appreciate what you are attempting to do with the Objectives. Linking them to key results that roll up through the hierarchy will be great. 

One thing I'm unclear on is the potential areas of disconnect, particularly at the team level. My teams have been using team level objectives to describe their goals for a PI. Most of these are feature related, and we have been using the Category field, which only allows the values 'Critical Path' and 'Stretch Goal' to document Committed and non-committed objectives (per SAFe practices). 

With the new experience, we have lost the ability to commit to objectives by selecting the category, as this field is not available. Furthermore, while key results measurement for Epics and features could/should be listed by a hard metric such as a percentage, dollar amount, NPS, the team metric will most likely use the value scale. It would be nice if this could be configurable in setting up the requirements for an objective, e.g. depending on the level I can control what my choices for OKR are. It might also be nice to bring these up to the theme level.

I'm also unclear if the choice to remain on the old experience vs. the new is one we will continue to have, or if there is a planned migration date

Finally, it would be nice to see an article of some sort describing the changes and impact of switching to the experience. whenever I search for this information, I find the documentation of how I create these objects, but I have not seen anything that discusses the benefits of linking objectives and why I might make the switch.

Thanks!

[Liza Merriman]

@Sam Ugulava  - We are looking into switching to the new OKR hub but we still use SAFe PI Objectives and Milestones. When I tried to switch to the new creation experience I receive a message that says these are not available yet. Is that currently planned?

[Bhanu Prakash]

Any idea when the new OKR Experience be turned on Permanantly and Old OKR experience/UI will be turned off ?