Coming Soon: New Objectives Tree

Jira Align will be updating our objective experience with a new and improved visualization of the Objectives Tree.

For a short period after the feature’s release, you’ll see the new Objectives Tree by default, but will be able to switch between the legacy (current) and new experience. Later, we will deprecate the current experience.

The new experience completely rethinks the visual representation for objectives and key results based on your actual goals and needs.

What else you'll find in the new Objectives Tree

• Simplified high-level reporting with quick filters helps portfolio managers focus on what’s most important, what needs attention, and how things are related. This helps organizations better visualize goals by providing a visual format that represents the status of objectives.
  
• Richer status reporting vocabulary provides greater nuance to in-progress objectives.
  This new view has enabled us to mimic the statuses of objectives tracked within Jira Align to the status options available in Team Central, which provides greater nuance than the previous statuses could. Instead of just a Not Started, In Progress, and Completed status, the new experience provides more options. These include Pending, Paused, On Track, At Risk, Off Track, and Completed. These statuses are displayed at the top of the page and the objectives can be easily sorted by status for further investigation into why something may be at risk or off track.
  
• Easier management-by-objective and course correction with at-a-glance portfolio views and drill-down capabilities including simpler reporting supported with visual controls, i.e., traffic-light indicators, progress bars, etc. The streamlined view puts the most important information on a single page and makes course correction conversations faster with a visual roll-up of the most pressing issues.
  • Portfolio objectives that drill into program level and team level objectives with the click of a button.
  • Track how much work still needs to occur to achieve the objective with Work progress bars.
    
  • Easily visualize how many key results are associated with each objective in the Key results column. Key results are tied to the specific work item as in, you will only see portfolio-level key results associated with the portfolio-level objective, not a roll-up of all key results associated with ALL program and team level objectives tied to the portfolio-level objective.
    
  • Easily see who is responsible for each objective in the Owner column.
    

Why are we making this change?

Enterprises at scale are transitioning towards thinking and aligning on business outcomes (or the desired result) as opposed to focusing on work output or outputs. Enterprises also want to unlock ambition and inspiration at every level, encouraging all teams to strive above and beyond without fear of failure culture.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are important in identifying the change organizations want to see in order to have an impact on the highest level needles or KPIs in the business.  More importantly, using them to develop hypotheses and measure impact, otherwise work will continue to be tracked by the traditional on time on budget with a focus on outputs as opposed to the impact it has on a business outcome or validating a hypothesis.

We are making this change for several reasons:

• To provide a better user experience through improved visual representations of OKRs
• To make high-level reporting more actionable by improving the nuance for in-progress OKRs
• To ensure better understanding and prioritization of the work surrounding OKRs to achieve objectives faster