In this article you will find information about one of the tools Ally provides through its integration: the Ally Bot. The Ally Bot is the key to making OKRs in Microsoft Teams a simple and intuitive process.

Once you have integrated your instance of Ally with your instance of Microsoft Teams, the Ally Bot will appear in your MS Teams window. This bot provides you with the ability to accomplish many of the OKR steps without having to ever log in to the Ally website.

As soon as you install the bot, Ally will add two personal tabs in the top navigation of your Ally Bot chat window alongside chat. The two tabs are:

The My OKRs tab will provide a default view of all your OKRs in Ally. From this tab, you can access, comment and check-in on OKRs you own right inside Teams.

To navigate and access additional details not on screen, Click the external link icon next to any objective that appears on hover. This action will open a new browser tab showing the objective details. From this page, you can navigate all OKR data inside the Ally web application. 

The Organization OKRs will provide a default view of your organization OKRs. From this tab, you can access, comment and check-in on any OKRs you own.  

Adding a new objective inside Teams is easy. Simply open any OKR view and Click + Add Objective. 

When the Add Objective page appears, you can enter your objective, add useful tags and description, choose a flexible measurement option, align the objective to another objective, and adjust owner, delegation and period. 

After you populate the objective information, you can choose to either Save and Close, or Save and Add Key Results.  

After adding an objective, and clicking Save and Add Key Result, the Add Key Result window will appear. On this page, you can add your key result, assign tags, add description, choose how you would like to measure success, add scoring guidance, a data integration, choose how to align, adjust owner, delegate and adjust time period. 

Once you have completed this information, you can Save and Close, or choose to Save and Add Another. 

There are several ways you can perform an OKR check-in inside Teams.  The first is by performing a focused OKR check-in. 

In Teams, the Ally Bot sends intelligent notifications periodically reminding you to update the progress of your OKRs based on your organization’s defined check-in cadence.  

This feature saves a lot of time and enables you to update multiple objectives at once with access to all the related context about the objectives without leaving MS teams. To do this, simply follow the reminder notification you received and click on Check-in. 

When the Check-in screen opens, you will have the flexibility to choose which OKRs you want to update or skip.  

Once your updates have been completed, a progress summary will appear in the Ally Bot.  

The second way to update your OKRs in Teams is by visiting the My OKRs tab. Once here, scroll down to the OKR you wish to update and Click the Check-in button. The process for updating objectives and key results are the same.

When the New check-in page appears, fill in the current progress and click Check in.