Upcoming improvements to the OKR slide out

[#1]

Hi, Jira Align!

My name is Sam Ugulava and I’m a Senior Product Manager working on the goal / objective experience.

We’ve been hearing lots of positive feedback on the new OKR experience, but we know it doesn’t yet have all the functionality of the legacy experience, which means many of you are still switching back and forth. Thank you for sharing feedback over the last several months – my team and I have reviewed every JAC bug and suggestion ticket and taken detailed notes during user interviews.

I’m excited to share that we’ve made quite a few major improvements to the OKR slide out, which will become available in production instances on December 8, 2023 for Cloud and December 13, 2023 for On-Prem customers.

What’s new?

Say hello to an improved OKR slide out – see a more organized, efficient, and detailed view of your objectives without switching back and forth between the new and legacy slide out.

• Terminology: simplified field names focused on clarity

• Feature parity: anchor sprint, start date, editable tiers, multi-select team, program, and solution children, category, type, planned value, delivered value, custom text area, and theme fields have been added to the OKR slide out.

• Section names: improved information architecture to make it easier to quickly find important data

---

What’s next for the new OKR slide out?

Notes

We know communicating updates and providing context is critical to the OKR experience. Users do have the ability to share a note when scoring a Key Result, but similar functionality is still missing from the new OKR slide out.

Instead of adding the Notes field into the OKR slide out, we’re looking into OKR updates and communication more holistically. We are starting to write requirements and explore designs and hope to address this gap next quarter (Jan-March). We’ll keep you updated as we make progress.

Required fields

We’ve reviewed several JAC tickets related to the objective details panel and setting required fields for the OKR slide out. We want to understand this experience better and will look to set up user interviews with customers in (Jan - March) to learn more.

Platform terminology

We want to understand the challenges with objective terminology before making significant updates to platform terminology. We are looking to standardize terms that are universal (perhaps, start date?) and give our customers the flexibility to match their unique ways of working. We plan to set up user interviews with customers (Jan-March) to learn more.

---

Feedback

We'd love to hear from you! 

[James Webber]

Thanks for sharing - are email notifications working now for items that users subscribe to in the new OKR screen?

Also I cannot see to change the Program (Value Stream) of an OBJ in the new screen, I can in the legacy screen.

[Sam Ugulava]

@James Webber , I'm aware of a ticket describing the issues with email notifications. We haven't addressed that issue yet, but it's in our long-term backlog. 

You will be able to change the Value Stream of an objective with the changes shared in this article. The improved OKR slide out will be in production on December, 8 2023 for our Cloud customers.

[James Webber]

Thanks @Sam Ugulava - looking forward to the new screens.

[Michael Holian]

@Sam Ugulava Thanks for the article, I look forward to the improvements. One item that drove us a bit nuts in the old experience was the category values, which do not align very well with SAFe Terms. I would feel the optimal way of addressing this would be to allow customization in Align under Platform settings, otherwise, at least adopt the SAFe values of Committed and Uncommitted.

[Sam Ugulava]

Thanks for the feedback, @Michael Holian ! Up next for us is looking at adding functionality to give admins the option to set required fields in the new slide out and update platform terminology. I'll keep a note that this is one of those fields you'd like to be able to customize. 

[Joris van D_]

I do not see above changes rolled out in the Test Instance on 10.127.1 although release notes Release notes for 10.127.X – Jira Align changes should be there.

[Isaac Greenberg]

@Sam Ugulava great start to these updates, especially looking forward to making KR's more flexible and value focused!  Looking at our sandbox for the upcoming 10.127 release, I have the following questions and observations -

• Custom text area - is this a regular custom field like others in the JA platform, or is this something specific to OKRs? Is there documentation for this available?
• Is there documentation on what Planned/Delivered value fields govern and their intended use vs objective score?
• I don't see the tool tip on rooms, would be useful
• Note still says Target Completion in the wizard when creating a new Objective
• 'Anchor' Sprint terminology can be confusing to end-users, would recommend something else if possible

[Adam Quinn]

The new slider looks amazing! Are there any notes on deprecating the previous view?

[Shyam prabhakaran]

Like the fact that the planned and delivered value have been incorporated in the new OKR view. Its a good feature for the users to use

[Drew Smith]

The "Programs" field, screen shot indicates that the change made was the field is not auto-populated with all the Programs. the user can manually add them. When we create an OKR the Programs are still auto-populating. There is at least an 'X' to the side where a single click removes them, following that step they can then manually be added. Is this 'X' in place of stopping the auto-poplation?