While Objectives and Key Results tell you what your goal is and how you will know when you got there, the best organizations also keep a laser focus on day to day execution to achieve their key results.
In this Article:
What are Projects?
JIRA Projects
How to structure Objectives, Key Results and Projects
Current Limitations with Projects
What are Projects
Projects help you keep track of all the work your organization is executing to achieve your OKRs. Like key results, projects can also be created under objectives and other key results in Ally.io, depending on which outcome they help to achieve. You can create a project by clicking on 'Add project' under the appropriate objective or key result.
JIRA Projects
Projects in Ally.io currently support JIRA, the popular project management system. Like the current JIRA integration, you can specify a JQL to retrieve the list of tasks from JIRA that constitute your project.
While Ally.io supports a JIRA integration for OKRs, projects let you see the individual tasks and their completion state, helping you understand your execution at a much deeper level. The updates for a project also call out what has changed since the last checkin - which tasks were completed, were any tasks added or removed.
Ally.io will periodically check on project progress in JIRA, and update status. Progress and Status is calculated for projects exactly like key results. Similar to key results, you can also check in on a project, where you can temporarily override the status. However, this will last only as long as Ally.io does not detect a change in the completion status of the project in JIRA, at which point, it will overwrite your checkin with an automated update.
How to structure Objectives, Key Results and Projects
The following are recommended ways to use Projects:
Objective that is tracked by a KPI metric: If a project must be completed to achieve the KPI metric, we recommend creating the project as a child of the Objective. Progress of the project will not roll up to the parent since it is KPI metric based.
Objective with multiple key results: Projects can be siblings to the key result, so you can see the outcomes needed to meet the objective (the key results) as well as the output needed to achieve those outcomes (the projects).
Projects are always placed after all the objectives and key results at each level of the hierarchy.
Current Limitations with Projects
Projects currently have the following limitations:
You cannot create unaligned, top level projects. They must align to an objective or key result.
You cannot edit the alignment for a project when creating it. You can only create it under an existing objective or key result, and it will be aligned to that objective or key result.
Private Projects are not supported. Projects can be seen by all Ally.io users.
You cannot clone projects, and you cannot perform bulk actions like changing time period on multiple projects at once.
Projects can have a maximum of 200 tasks.
Now you can understand how your teams are executing to meet your OKRs, and dive in to unblock them. In the future, we plan to add other popular project management systems, so that Ally.io can give you a holistic view of your business.
Projects in Ally.io are available across all our pricing plans. The JIRA On Premise integration for Projects is only available for Enterprise Customers (JIRA Cloud is available across all plans). If you would like to have this enabled for your organization please have an account admin reach out to [email protected] with the request.