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Viva Goals Product Tips!
Happy New Year! January, a chapter of new beginnings, a canvas for fresh dreams, and a month to paint the year with vibrant possibilities. Embrace the journey ahead! I'm excited to come back with some fresh product tips this month. The top trends continue to remain the same - Creating/Managing OKRs, Purchasing Viva Goals licenses, Integrations and Enabling users. Let's dive into the tips: Zapier Integration - Viva Goals support integration with industry-leading tools and platforms you use every day. However, for the few applications that are not supported, we do have an alternate method. Our integration with Zapier will allow you to connect Viva Goals with all the tools you use every day. With the Zapier integration, you can automate the check-ins in Viva Goals when an event occurs in the other tool. You can check https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/zapier-integration for more details. Email notifications - Are you not receiving emails like check-in reminders, explorer exports, summary updates from Goals? Here's something you can check - by default all emails from Goals are sent to the UPN ID of the user profile in Entra ID. If your UPN doesn't have an inbox associated with it, you'd not be receiving the emails from us. We've seen cases where customers want to route the emails to the alias field in Entra ID instead of the UPN. If that's your requirement, you can contact the support team and they'll help you fix this. Approval Workflow - We're seeing customers mention that they're missing the option to change the approval workflow status for their OKRs. This happens when you're in a view with multiple time periods. The workflow status has to be updated individually for each entity and each time period. When multiple time periods are selected, you'll not see the option to change the status. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I'll come back with new tips next month.Viva Goals Product Tips!
Happy Friday and welcome back! As the calendar gracefully turns its pages to December, I find myself reflecting on the journey of the past months and the anticipation of what lies ahead. In the spirit of the season, I wanted to take a moment to extend my warmest wishes to you. I repeat - for those who are seeing this post for the first time - this is Meena, a Senior Program Manager from the Viva Goals team. I've been part of the product for close to 3 years. If you're looking for some tips and tricks that would make your experience with Viva Goals smoother, and more efficient, let's get started. The top trends continue to remain the same - Creating/Managing OKRs, Purchasing Viva Goals licenses, Integrations, and Enabling users. However, I have some new tips that would help you use Viva Goals efficiently: 1. Inviting Entra Groups to Org/Team as Members - Instead of adding/inviting the users individually to your Viva Goals instance, you can create or invite existing Entra groups as members of your org and teams. Provisioning and de-provisioning of users in the Entra groups is also reflected in Viva Goals accordingly. Earlier, we didn't support adding M365 groups as members of the team but this is also supported now. You can read more about this topic https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/create-and-edit-teams-and-subteams#how-to-add-members-to-a-team. 2. OKR creation permissions - Have you been looking for a way to manage which team members can create OKRs for your team? If you've not already figured it out, there's a way to restrict/allow team members to do this. From the team's page, expand the 3 dots icon and look for the team settings. More information is available https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/configure-okr-create-permissions#create-permissions-for-teams. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I'll come back with new tips next month.Viva Goals - Product Tips!
Happy Monday! As the holiday season approaches and the weather changes, I'm back with some helpful tips for November. I repeat - for those who are seeing this post for the first time - this is Meena, a Senior Program Manager from the Viva Goals team. I've been part of the product for close to 3 yrs. If you're looking for some tips and tricks that would make your experience with Viva Goals smoother, and more efficient, let's get started. There's not much change in the top trends, our customers are mostly interested in Creating/Managing OKRs, Purchasing Viva Goals licenses, Integrations, and Enabling users. Below are some tips that would help you use Viva Goals more effectively: 1. Auditing - Global admins can audit activities on Viva Goals by searching the audit section of the https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcompliance.microsoft.com%2F&data=05%7C01%7Csusbhatia%40microsoft.com%7Cfe608d17064441d9162308db152377d1%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C638127014381975186%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=3sf6iXmnIV1JUmfwymJOQkjWW%2BAUFBVxj58GX6e5w9k%3D&reserved=0. In the MAC portal, users with the 'Audit Log Reader' role will be able to access the audit logs. This is useful when you want to find the users who performed actions like adding/deleting users/OKRs/teams. The list of user and admin activities in Viva Goals that are logged for auditing can be seen at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/audit-log-activities?. 2. Integrations - When trying to setup the Jira On Prem integration, if your org is using SAML SSO based authentication to access Jira On Prem, the same SSO credentials cannot be used to complete the setup. We recommend that you use a username/password based Jira account and its credentials to complete the integration. This is required only for the connection setup. You can find this covered https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/jira-on-prem-integration#faq-frequently-asked-questions. 3. License Management - Are you already using Microsoft Entra Groups for managing licenses? With Microsoft Entra groups, you can grant access and permissions to a group of users instead of for each individual user. When groups are used, only members of those groups can access the resource. You can assign a Viva Goals license to the Microsoft Entra groups and these groups can be invited as users to your Viva Goals org. You can read more about it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/viva-goals-deployment-guide#assign-licenses. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I'll come back with new tips next month.Viva Goals - Product Tips
Hello everyone! This is Meena, a Senior Program Manager from the Viva Goals team. I've been part of the product for the past 2+ years. It should be quite interesting to know what our customers talk more about in Viva Goals. We also thought you might appreciate some quick and handy product tips to enhance your everyday experience with Viva Goals. The majority of our customer interactions have been around Creating/Managing OKRs, Purchasing Viva Goals licenses, Trial Expiries/Extensions, Integrations, and License Management. Here are some quick tips if you're stumbling upon similar scenarios: Roll over unfinished objectives - When you close an OKR at the end of your time period, you have the ability to choose between closing or continuing working on the same OKR in the next time period. It also gives you options to preserve or reset the current progress. If you'd like to continue the progress from where you left, you can reset it or choose to preserve the existing start and target values. You can read more about cloning https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/cloning-objectives. Self-Serve and Admin Led Trials - If you are an individual who'd like to sign up for Viva Goals self-serve trial on your org's existing Microsoft 365 tenant using your business credentials, you can visit https://goals.microsoft.com/ and click “Start Trial”. If you are a tenant admin who wants to sign up for a trial for your org, you can do it from here - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-viva/goals or from the https://admin.microsoft.com/#/homepage. Integrations - If you don't find the applications you'd like to link your OKRs to, you can reach out to your Viva Goals admin or your tenant admin and have them enable the integrations for your tenant. More details on this is available https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/vg-integrations-administration-overview. We're excited to share similar tips with you on a monthly basis. Watch out for more updates next month.How to write great goals, get six-pack abs, and live forever
Your diet can often seem complicated, but writing great goals doesn't have to be. This blog post investigates how simple rules from diet and fitness experts can translate into writing great goals, ultimately distilling it down to 12 key words. How to write great goals, get six-pack abs, and live foreverOFFICE HOUR - 2nd May - Top 3 tips for writing awesome OKRs
I'LL BE ONLINE TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS AT 08:00 PST/16:00 UK TODAY. Just post them in the comments, and I'll respond there. Top 3 tips for writing awesome OKRs For such a simple concept, there’s a lot to get to grips with when starting to work with OKRs. They represent such a fundamental shift in the way in which goals are formed and worked with if you want to fully leverage their potential value; systems, routines, a framework, training, these all need to be worked out first. So, is it right to think that writing them is the easy part? Well, yes and no. A well formed set of OKRs will help get you off to a strong start and help to set the standard for others when writing theirs. Here are my 3 top tips to help you overcome challenges you might face when writing your OKRs: Know your Key Results There are three types of KR and it’s important to know which one is right for what you’re trying to achieve. The first (and the best) is a lagging measure. This metric measures the impact of work that has already been done. It’s the best type of KR as it is a clear measurement of the value created, not actions completed. Value is in the eye of the beholder, though, so it’s important to agree on the value measure when you are forming the Objective. The second is a leading measure. This is also a metric, but instead of it being a measurement of value, it provides an indication that you are on the right track. The third is a milestone measure. This is your fallback when you don’t have data available, so can’t use a metric. It helps you to avoid a binary “yes/no” KR, which is useless when it comes to transparently scoring and reporting progress. Don’t daisy chain This is where a KR of a “parent” OKR is used as the Objective of the ‘child’ OKR, which aligns with it. This might seem like a good idea when it comes to aligning your OKRs, but, in my view, this is a big mistake for a number of reasons: 1 - It removes the opportunity (and so disempowers) those working at the next level to form creative solutions to solve the challenges set by the OKRs they are aligning into. 2 - It causes confusion as objectives start to feature metrics, so then what’s the difference between an O and a KR? 3 - You could end up with a single objective supported by nothing but key results Mind your blind spot If all you do is just write an Objective statement that is two or three words long, you’re missing a trick, and this is a mistake I see leadership teams make often. Brevity is often tempting, as the belief is “it will do” and that we (ie. Leadership) understand it, but this is a blind spot for them. But what about the wider audience? The best Objective statements are the ones which instil a sense of motivation in the reader so they can say “I get that and I want in!” So I hope you find these helpful. If you have any more questions about writing OKRs, just put them in the comments below, and I’ll do my best to help you out. Best of luck in all things OKR 🙂
Private Objectives
Hi, Trying to set up some sensitive objective as came across https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/private-objectives-key-results This is exactly the functionality I am looking for, however, the documentation does not cover where is the feature to be enabled. I have gone to goals admin and organization settings under viva goals but no dice.Viva Goals - Product Tips!
Happy Friday! It feels great to come back this month with some fresh product tips. For those who are seeing this post for the first time - this is Meena, a Senior Program Manager from the Viva Goals team. I've been part of the product for close to 3 years. If you're looking for some tips and tricks that would make your experience with Viva Goals smoother, and more efficient, let's get started. Like the previous months, our customers have been talking about Creating/Managing OKRs, Purchasing Viva Goals licenses, and Integrations. We're seeing more queries around Explorer and Dashboards as well. Highlighted below are some key points to note when using these features in Viva Goals: 1. Explorer - The filters in the explorer are applied only to the top-level objectives by default. On expanding the objectives, you'd still see the key results that do not match your filters. This is the behavior by design. If you want to see a flat view of all the objectives and key results that only match your filter, you must the flat list view. This gives you an expanded list of OKRs that only meet your filter criteria: You can read more about the Explorer https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/explorer. 2. Dashboard - When embedding external links to your dashboard widget, ensure you're generating embeddable URLs from other applications like PowerBI, SharePoint, Word, etc. Copy-pasting the URLs directly from the applications' web pages might not always work. More on the custom embed feature can be found https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/custom-url-widget#Using%20the%20Embed%20URL%20feature. 3. Trial and Paid subscriptions - Have you wondered what happens to your Viva Goals data if you're unable to purchase a Viva Goals subscription before the trial expiry? We follow a 90-day data retention policy - all your data will be retained for 90 days from the trial expiry. If you purchase a subscription before the end of this retention period (90 days), the data will be available as it was. You can read more about our policies https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/vg-privacy-and-security. Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I'll come back with new tips next month. Happy Weekend!Viva Goals - Product Tips!
Hi everyone! We're excited to meet you all again with some product tips. For those who are seeing this post for the first time - this is Meena, a Senior Program Manager from the Viva Goals team. I've been part of the product for the past 2+ years. We thought you might appreciate some quick and handy product tips to enhance your everyday experience with Viva Goals. Last month, our customers have been mostly talking about Creating/Managing OKRs, Purchasing Viva Goals licenses, Trial Expiries/Extensions, Integrations, and Admin Configurations. Below are a few tips if you have questions about the same features: Managing team members - Have you been looking to manage the team members from within the Admin > Members section? If yes, that's not the right place to do it. You can view all members of a team (individual members and groups) by navigating to the team page and selecting team members from the options on the top right corner of the page. From there, you can add members to the team, and promote team admins. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/managing-team-members#managing-members-for-a-team where you can read more about this. OKR Contributions - Wondering why your child objectives and projects are not contributing to the progress of the parent objective? Child objectives and projects won't contribute to the objective by default and contributions will always have to be manually changed. You can check out our article https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/viva/goals/configuring-okrs for more information. Parent objective not closed though child KRs are closed - Did you also come across this? Yes, this is the behavior by design. The parent objectives have to be closed manually as they don't close automatically upon closure of the child KRs. Thanks for reading and have a great day! We'll come back with new tips next month.
