The summer is over, the school year is beginning, and another release of Agile Tools is ready. A new version (2022.17) is available.
The OKR Library is getting bigger and bigger - you now have access to 50+ Goal templates, 400+ Key Result templates, and 200+ metrics. And it will only get bigger and better!
The Library, in itself, is an excellent source of OKR knowledge, and the plethora of OKR examples will hopefully inspire your teams and shorten the goal-planning events so that you can focus on execution.
You can now use the search on the main Library page and filter by Goal/Objective, Key Results, and Metrics. Each result has a detail page, which is modest at the moment, but we have big plans to bring you more quality content in the future!
The option for creating Key Results selected from the Library is now available. This is now the fastest way to create a Key Result. Not that you should hurry through the process, that is not the intention. As with the other two Key Result creation methods, you will still go through the wizard steps; only some steps will already be pre-populated with values from the template.
Also, with many Goals in the Library, you can now use those templates and create the whole OKR in one swift and intuitive motion.
Instead of typing in the Goal name, a button is now available ("ADD FROM LIBRARY ") in the Goal creation wizard at step one.
When pressed, the overlay will open with Goal templates to choose from. But you will not only be able to select the "whole package", the OKR, but you can pick which Key Results you want to use to start the drafting process with the team.
We hope that Time-to-Value or one of your "a-ha" moments using Agile Tools will happen around this Library functionality.
A minor but important addition also happened on the "My Board" page, which is a default one after logging in. We added the "Accountability" card that displays all the Goals you are the owner of and all the Key Results you are the caretaker of.
There is an important concept to understand about how the Agile Tools OKR platform approaches goal setting on a personal/individual/employee level.
We believe, and field experience also confirms, that more and more organizations are becoming team-oriented, and not so much emphasis is on every individual. This observation is translated to the logic of how OKRs are created.
Agile Tools does not use the term "level" as it sounds and encourages hierarchy, which we want to minimize in modern organizations. Any organization will have management and departmental hierarchy; that is a human cultural fact. Agile Tools uses the term "scope". You can create OKRs for three major scopes: Team (cross-functional), Value Unit (your products, projects, services, etc.), and Organizational Unit (company, sales department, branch, plant, etc.).
And here comes the crux of personal involvement in any OKR - every Goal must have an owner, just one. And, every Key Result must have a caretaker (one or two). This concept is where the rubber meets the road - how any individual/employee contributes to shared goals, even company vision.
So, not everybody, all the time. Personal OKRs are a great way to hinder or even completely break your goal-setting journey. And you may not recover for years.
Please trust us on this one.
What is coming next?
Before the Early Access with a free trial period becomes available to all OKR practitioners, we want to round up the Goal Boards functionality.
At the moment, you can view and use the Team Goal Board. This page is intended to be the main page for cross-functional team members to "gather around". Regular check-in events should happen during the Goal period where Key Result caretakers update the values, take notes of the learnings, and adjust the course if necessary to achieve the targets.
We want to do the same for Value and Organizational Units. Value Unit Goal Boards and Organizational Unit Goal Boards will be available in the next release. With this, if you create an OKR for some of your products or services (Value Units), you will have a "home page" for that. And the same goes for the more classical approach, where you set OKRs for departments, for example, for Marketing. Then you will be able to use the Marketing Org Unit Goal Board.
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