Mondays can be great. A new version (2023.4) of Agile Tools is now available, bringing some anticipated quality-of-life improvements.
Remember, we are focusing on goal management now, Objectives and Key Results, but the platform will help you to manage Sprint Goals as part of supporting the Scrum framework with all its events.
And, since the term Value Item is mentioned in this release notes - just a quick reminder: JIRA has Issues, we have Value Items.
OKR Detail Page
The expanded Key Result panels provide a condensed view of every Key Result. Mini versions of the gauge and line charts offer just enough information to make an informed decision.
If you click the Key Result name or the VIEW button, you will navigate to the Key Result’s detail page with more information and actions.
Don’t forget the Value Items that you can link to the Key Results! Daily work (tasks) are connected to any Key Result, ensuring visibility of how our work influences achieving targets set in the Key Results.
You can expand and collapse all the Key Results with just a click. And since you asked, we added another improvement.
Another way to perform Check-ins
Until this version, you could only do a Check-in at the Key Result’s detail page. Now, you can do this operation/event right from the expanded Key Result panel.
A “+CHECK-IN” button at the bottom right of the Key Result expanded panel opens a compact check-in form with similar input fields as in the wizard version.
The Goals Table View
We did a second pass on the Goals Table View, adding a few new features:
Quick filtering (by year and quarters)
Expanding any Goal (Objective) to see its Key Results
Expand all/Collapse all action icons
Configurable columns
The Cogwheel icon for configuring the table columns appears on mouse hover over the table’s header.
Some other OKR Management improvements
With the previous release, the KPIs and Health Metrics feature was introduced. As you may know, there are several ways to create a Key Result in Agile Tools:
From Key Result Library
From Metric Template
Generic Key Result
Quick Create
From version 2023.4 on, you can also create a Key Result from the existing Health Metric. You can observe hundreds of Health Metrics. When you observe one getting in bad shape, you can now create a Key Result from it to make it green again.
We have observed that some of you had difficulties in the first step of the Key Result (based on a metric) wizard, which is why we fiddled a bit with the input field not to confuse anyone that a metric template can be created on the spot but must be selected from the existing ones from the Library.
The Value Item detail page got a minor improvement - a smart multi-button for navigating to a suitable Workboard was added.
What is coming next?
Before some significant additions, we would like to brush up on existing pages and come up with OKR management improvements.
Starting with My Board, you will be able to see your latest Value Items, the Teams card will be upgraded to show only one team at a time, but you will be able to scroll through all the teams you are part of, and the Accountability card will get a VIEW button to take you to this new page.
The new Accountability page will join together the Goals you are the owner of, the Key Results you are the caretaker of, the five most recent Value Items, and the personal KPIs.
The Goal Boards for Teams, Value Units, and Organizational Units will get some love too. You will be able to see the last Check-in notes for every Key Result and be able to do the Check-ins also from these pages. With this, you will have three slightly different methods of check-ins for every taste.