Jira Align Update: Improved OKR Experience

Today, the new OKR Experience in Jira Align was officially released by Atlassian. Within the release (10.104), an entirely new and improved visual representation of the Objective trees was realized. The new experience offers some helpful features and representations that provide the user with valuable and insightful information at first glance.

Why the visual representation of the OKRs has been completely restructured?

The new user experience is tailored to give the customer a more precise and clearer status overview in relation to the enterprise objectives. The goal of all companies is to inspire ambition and inspiration at all levels and to encourage all teams to evolve. According to Atlassian, it became clear that the old way of presenting OKRs was not suitable for providing a clear overview of the overall status of the business objectives. To help organizations achieve their vision more efficiently, the solution has now been redesigned and enhanced to provide an optimal user experience through visual representations of OKRs in Jira Align.

Furthermore, aspects were reconsidered within the update, such as all users can better track and prioritize tasks related to their OKRs and thus accelerate the achievement of their goals.

What new improvements does the update bring with it?

The update to the OKR management user interface in Jira Align includes several improved features that allow users to register the status, and therefore the progress or stagnation, of organizational objectives so they can take action based on that status.

With an easy-to-read and clear overview, teams have all the information they need to respond to risks and threats in their goal execution.

The enhancements, which are detailed below, result in a unique solution in the field of OKR management that offers the most comprehensive and user-friendly results on the market.

The following enhancements are now applicable in Jira Align:

• Clearer guidance on what is going well, what needs help, and what is off the rails all from a single screen.
• Simplified high-level reporting that helps Portfolio Managers focus on what’s most important, what needs attention, and how things are related.
• Richer status reporting vocabulary that provides greater nuance to in-progress objectives
• Instead of just a “Not Started”, “In Progress”, and “Completed Status”, the new experience provides more options such as 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.
• Easier management-by-objective and course correction with at-a-glance portfolio views and drill-down capabilities including simpler reporting consumption supported with visual controls, i.e., traffic-light indicators, progress bars, etc.
• Portfolio Objectives that drill into program level and team level objectives with the click of a button.
• Work progress bars to easily track how much work still needs to occur to achieve the objective.
• Clear visualization on how many Key Results are associated with each Objective. These are tied to the specific work item as in, you will only see Portfolio level KRs associated with the Portfolio Level Objective.

All of the new capabilities are primarily designed to provide users with the ability to take early action when objectives cannot be tracked or met. Jira Align therefore offers companies of all types a unique support to present, track and manage their OKR's in one place and in an easily comprehensive way.

If you need more detailed information on the update or on the general implementation, usage or deployment of Jira Align, don't hesitate to get in touch with our experts.