Viva Goals: Implementing a System of ‘OKRs’ – Objectives and Key Results
The 365 Suite offers an integrated functionality that spans Project, Planner and Teams to enable high performance organization.
The purpose of implementing a program like Project Management 365 is to achieve high performance teams.
Therefore a key requirement is of course the ability to define and measure what constitutes high performance, and also empower staff with the tools to accomplish the stated goals.
OKRs: Objectives and Key Results
This is where the broader 365 suite becomes especially important, most notably offering tools to implement a framework of ‘OKRs‘ – Objectives and Key Results.
As the term suggests this is a simple system of stating what goals the organization wants to achieve, and what project initiatives they need to implement to achieve them, so that they can easily monitor and understand what progress they are making towards them.
Viva Goals
For this Microsoft offers ‘Viva Goals‘, with the critical facet being that this isn’t some standalone enterprise application that staff find cumbersome to use and thus counter-intuitive to the objective.
In contrast they offer an approach where the functionality is built directly into the collaboration environment that teams are already using, making it a natural component part of their daily work.
As the Microsoft Mechanics demonstrate in this video that if you’re a manager or a team member, Viva Goals makes it easier to align and stay focused on the strategic priorities of your organization and work together to accelerate progress.
Vetri Vellore, Viva Goals team lead at Microsoft, joins Jeremy Chapman for a closer look at how this brand-new goal setting and management solution helps drive clarity around your objectives and key results, and makes it seamless for teams to track progress against them as they work.
Project, Planner and Teams
Critically Viva Goals also integrates with the Project app, and also with their ‘Planner‘ app, and all of these integrations can be driven from within Teams.
As explained here you can connect Project to Viva Goals, where you can track progress on OKRs and the projects that align to them by leveraging the Project for the web integration with Viva Goals as a single source of truth.
Similarly Planner offers a lightweight Project Management environment, where you can easily set up project structures but without having to go into a full PM mode, such as Kanban Boards to schedule, visualize and manage team tasks, and as it matures to a more complex body of work you can then migrate it into Project.
Learn more about the integration of Viva Goals with Microsoft Project and Microsoft Planner in this video, and how it helps teams align their projects to the organizations’ OKRs and increase visibility of progress across stakeholders.
Both Planner and Project can be integrated into Teams so that organizing and progressing project tasks are a natural and fluid function of live team work. Furthermore there are features that help individuals better manage their own workload, such as ‘Assigned to Me’. You can quickly catch up or stay on top of tasks that you own by identifying recent progress or changes that impact the schedule with Task History in Project.
