Forum Widgets
Latest Discussions
OKRs vs KPIs
Many organisations have set up existing KPIs that help them to track the state of key measures across their organisation, with these either being transparent to all or shared at regular townhalls. The temptation would be to use these in their entirety within Viva Goals to power the key results of your OKRs but that would be a mistake. One of the super powers of OKRs is to have Focus and to share that Focus from the strategy of the organisation at the top down to each level. Empowering each layer in an organisation to define their own metrics for success for the top level objective brings a more personal goal that is aligned to what the organisation is striving to achieve. You can read more about my thoughts on this in a recent article I shared through Reworked - Why You Need Both OKRs and KPIs (reworked.co). What have you done in your organisation
How AI and Microsoft's Co-Pilot Will Change Business
A colleague asked me how I thought AI and specifically Microsoft's co-pilot will change business and the way we work. https://www.okradvisors.com/post/how-ai-will-change-business are my top of mind thoughts. Please comment and add your own. Microsoft is moving super fast to incorporate AI into all of its business applications. AI will create new opportunities and obviate others. To prepare for the new AI world we need to educate ourselves on AI as it is applied to business. Some of the opportunities to improve business operations, and potential disruptions I see are outlined below. 1. Data & Applications Data integrity will become even more important than it is today Improved integration of applications as AI will create intelligence out of information based on technology and data wherever it resides Increased importance of APIs and interfaces 2. I can see AI templates being created for many business functions such as Reports (Scorecards, dashboards, etc.) - See exactly what you want to see in real time, as well as flag issues automatically, and develop projected solutions Automated process mapping and suggested improvements Automated RACIs Automated actions - based on certain data actions will automatically be taken for things like accounts receivable, payables, inventory ordering, etc. Automated business cases and justifications Improved research on markets, competitors, partnerships, etc. that will inform strategy Improved prioritization of investments Improved data security Improved compliance Improved customer relationship management Improved budgeting and tracking Improved marketing spending, tracking, testing 3. Improved personal productivity including: Simplifying and automating communications Speed of development and improved quality of presentations, financials, documents Improved decision-making with better data 4. What AI will disrupt and cause the need to rethink: People & Organizations - Leadership, organization, teams will need to be rethought as many processes will be automated Product Development - as code will be created quickly and easily with AIMy favorite Viva Goals feature - multi alignment - and how I use it.
Hi everyone! I wanted to share my thoughts around a personal favorite feature of mine, multi-alignment in Viva Goals, and how we’ve been using it both internally at Microsoft and across some of the customers I work with. There are three primary use cases I’ve found for multi-alignment and I’m going to walk through each of those below. “Promoting” a key result to be aligned to the team and department level I was working with a team here at Microsoft and their leader was very much so a delegator. When it came to goal setting, they wanted to see what the team came up with first, and then provide input. So they had their team of 7 create goals for each of their representative organization and present those back to the leader. From there, the leader then picked out a handful of Key Results they wanted ‘promoted’ up to their level. What I really mean by ‘promoted’ is that they were multi-aligning the key results that were selected to be aligned to both levels of objectives. One key result object, but aligned to multiple levels of objectives. There was representation from each organization and the beauty of doing this in Viva Goals, was that there needed to be only one update on the key result, but it was viewable and contributing across multiple objectives. Saving time and keeping them aligned. Contributing to both an Objective and as a sub-KR Many times I run into or work with teams that want to manage their goals in two different ways. The first side of the house might be focused solely on the numbers. “Away with these ‘Objectives’ just show me the targets were trying to hit and how they break down across our regions” I heard them say. We accomplished this by setting a Key Result and then creating sub-Key Results and sub-sub Key results underneath. All creating a big tree of contributions that worked well for them. On the flip side, the other team was also focused on similar targets, but made them a part of a cohesive OKR that included more than just the targets themselves. As you can see above, both sets of goals across these teams included Key Results from the other. The difference was, rather than creating two different key results to track the same target, which would require two sets of owners and two sets of updates, we used the same single key result object and multi-aligned it as both a sub-KR and to an Objective. You can see above, Viva Goals made this much easier to save time and keep them aligned. Multi-alignment strikes again. Aligning one KR to multiple Objectives The last example here is also like those above, but rather than aligning across levels or across goal objects, we’re aligning across teams. The biggest draw of having a more rigorous and managed goal setting program is the alignment you achieve across your company. Well, what’s the best way to achieve that alignment and make sure we’re all focused on the same outcomes? Sharing the same outcomes, of course! In many cases when I’m working with a team, new relationship or old, I like to have a conversation about where we can share the same outcomes to ensure that we’re both moving in the same direction. With Viva Goals we can quite literally share the same key results, even if they’re aligned to different Objectives or living alongside different other outcomes. I took a single key result object and multi-aligned that to two different objectives across two different teams, making sure they both are progressing towards a common outcome. How have you all been using multi-alignment?How to bake OKRs into operating rhythms 🥁
It's the start of fiscal year planning for Microsoft and that means budgets, OKRs, and product planning are top of mind in Engineering. We try to infuse OKRs into the culture by: Having teams estimate the impact of their Engineering initiatives (e.g. ADO epics) on OKRs during their product planning. This helps give visibility into the engineering investments and how they are expected to impact our OKRs. Reviewing OKRs as part of our Monthly Business Reviews. As we all know, planning and estimation is a non-trivial effort. I find the effort up-front helps to set expectations and tells us if we are on track during our monthly reviews. We bake OKRs into the operating rhythms with templates that include a column for the estimated impact in planning documents. During MBRs, we review OKR status and call-out engineering investments that may be putting a KR at risk. Speaking of tying initiatives to impact, some of our teams have been using Viva Goals "Projects" ️ entities to track the initiatives explicitly. Have you been tracking your initiatives using Projects? I'm curious if other teams are leveraging the "Projects" in this way. One thing that I think would be great is if the Viva Goals Projects could have a metric value associated with Key Result. Currently, we have just been including the value in the Title so that it communicates the weighted impact on the KR. Would you find it valuable to have a weight or value associated with the Project entities?Data storytelling with Viva Goals 🎯 Review Dashboards
Before Viva Goals existed, our team was stuck in the world of updating PowerPoint, Word, Excel with the status updates. In the early days of Viva Goals, we evolved into copying select Viva Goals visuals into a PowerPoint. At the very least, we could rely on Viva Goals being our source of truth and not worry about which version of the PowerPoint we were using. While the dashboard provides focus in the key metric and status, I find that metric owners still rely on visual storytelling to communicate context to our leaders. Here are 3 ways that I am using to streamline the OKR review board: 1. Customize the OKR List view to only show the necessarily columns. The minimum columns I include are the Owner, Status and progress, and Last Check-in note. Other columns are often redundant, such as the time period, for the quick review. 2. Embed the exact "live" visual needed Let's face it, maintaining content is a pain and you'll have to worry if you've captured the latest. I like to embed the specific slide in a PowerPoint that I need to call-out. There's a handy "Link to this slide" feature that you can use so that you don't accidentally show the default first page of a PowerPoint slide. I'm hoping our PowerPoint online team will improve the feature so that the editor framing doesn't show up by default in the future. 🙂 Another great candidate that I haven't explored yet would be a pre-filtered Power BI dashboard. 3. Create a navigation pane with more details. I add a navigation panel to related resources like a dashboard, or sub-team dashboard in either the "Key Updates" section of the OKR Detail widget or using a Text Block. What other tips do you have to make the Review Dashboards useful in your monthly or weekly reviews? Do you have a dashboard mock-up to share with me for inspiration?OKR Retrospectives
I spoke about using the power of storytelling to showcase achievements and learnings at the end of each OKR cycle at our Viva Goals Office Hours session in March. The ability to tell the story behind the data allows us to contextualise the facts and help our colleagues connect the dots and co-create solutions together. Here is a link to the recording. Two critical activities mark the end of each OKR cycle: Reviews and Retrospectives. Closing and scoring your OKRs occurs during the reviews, and retrospectives provides an opportunity to reflect on the highlights, lowlights, and learnings. These activities are some of the powerful benefits of the OKR framework helping organisations operationalize learnings. Our customers shared their experiences and challenges with OKR retrospectives during the session. I shared some best practises, such as planning retrospective sessions in advance and being intentional about creating psychologically safe environments. As the philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey so aptly stated, "we do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience." How have retrospective sessions helped your organisation?
Viva Goals - Reassigning Objectives & Key Results
Hi All, I’m wondering if someone would be able to help with what seems like a Viva Goals glitch described below please? It seems that when reassigning objectives or key results within Viva Goals, it seems to ‘hang onto’ the data from the older owner when creating filtered views. E.G.1: I reassigned objectives & key results what were initially assigned to OldUser1, to NewUser2. Yet, when I do a filter by owner OldUser1, which should be blank, it shows me NewUser2 newly assigned objectives E.G.2: Similarly, User3 has reassigned some of his objectives to others, yet when filtering for his objectives only, it brings up other objectives that are no longer related to User3. These also appear within his “My OKRs” view which clutters up his filtered view. I’m guessing its something to do with cached data maybe but just guessing. Would anyone know of a solution to this please?
KR going to 3 decimal places when source does not?
Hi folks, first time posting here! Has anyone noticed with Power BI as a source for a KR that Viva Goals uses 3 decimal places, even if the source (in this case a Power BI report) has 0 decimal places. This is what I see in Viva Goals: Compared to Power BI:
Changed Planning year and lost our OKR's
Hey Everyone, Trying to figure out a solution here. I have recently become the Viva Goals admin (we only have viva goals) at our organization. We are rolling out OKR's to manage objectives for management in IT. On of the departments in IT was doing a POC with Viva Goals last year, and despite our actual planning year starting in April, they didn't realize that the planning year setting let you set it so they left it at January created custom time ranges for our planning year. This year we decided to change the planning year setting for full roll out - so I went ahead and made this change. Unfortunately, when I made this change, we are now unable to find last year's OKR's. Can you offer any suggestions for how we might recover them? They're mostly closed out, but the group wants to do a retrospective next week.
