We are ironing out existing pages and features. A new version (2023.5) of Agile Tools is now available.
Building a digital product with the name Agile in its name is putting our process in the spotlight! We strive to deliver (small) vertical slices to you in a regular cadence, so we can get the feedback sooner to make the empirical decisions faster.
We are now focusing on goal and performance management, Objectives and Key Results, Key Performance Indicators, and Health Metrics. However, the platform will help you manage Sprint Goals to support the Scrum framework with all its events.
Accountability
We decided to be different from any other goal management tool on the market by not implementing personal OKRs.
Personal accountability is achieved by setting (cross-functional) team OKRs where (some) team members become Key Result caretakers.
Usually, a team lead sets the inspiring Objective and leads the alignment effort to other OKRs, team ones, and company ones.
Team members then negotiate and use critical thinking in the process of crafting the Key Results to achieve the leader-set Objective.
Everybody on the Agile Tools platform has an Accountability page and is transparently accessible to all platform users.
Transparency is one of the OKR pillars; embracing it will propel the company and professional personal growth.
My Board - revisited
The My Board page was one of the first designed, so we did a second pass now with the latest release.
Agile Tools is a team-first platform, which is reflected with an emphasis on creating and viewing the teams. The team is often a synonym for a group of people from the same department, not in Agile Tools.
We encourage cross-functional teams whenever possible and then create OKRs for such a team. Of course, the teams you create are not for the purpose of goal management but are a “side effect”. The core purpose of cross-functional teams originates or is designed for product-led companies.
You can now slide through each team you are a member of in the Teams card.
The new card on My Board is My Value Items, displaying your daily work items.
The Accountability card got some lipstick: the “days left” information and the VIEW button that navigates you to the new Accountability page.
The Goal Boards pages
The idea behind having several types of Goal Boards is to gather around goals with the right people, do the (bi)weekly Check-ins, and navigate your goal structures.
There is a Team Goal Boards page which is tailored for every individual. Any person logged in will have a tailored view of the Team they are part of.
And the same goes for the Value and Organizational Units. You will be, by default, shown the goals for the products/projects/initiatives/… you are participating in and the goals for the departments you are part of.
Everything is configurable. Try it out.
The image below is an example of an OKR set on a product (a type of Value Unit). You can see that this product is built by just one team called Space Cowboys.
What is new is the possibility of doing the Check-ins also from those pages now. This is now the third, slightly different way to engage in this essential OKR event.
Also, the latest notes for every Key Result are now displayed below each one, if present.
What is coming next?
At the beginning of July, we released a significant feature that took much effort - KPIs and Health Metrics bridging to the world of Objectives and Key Results.
Whenever you decide to create a Key Result based on some metric template, the values you provide at regular OKR check-in events will be stored not in the Key Result but in the underlying metric.
Because of this, you can also see the collected data values on the KPI and Health Metric pages. This opens quite some options for approaching performance and goal management with one tool.
So, for the next release, we plan to introduce a few more KPI and Health Metric dashboards. You will be able to navigate Team, Value Unit, and Organizational Unit KPIs and Health Metrics.
It is all coming nicely together.