Managing Objectives
      Back to home
      1. Inspire Online Help Center
      2. Objectives
      3. Managing Objectives

      Aligning an Objective

      Align your objective to other objectives or to the corporate strategy to share your contributions with your team and organization.

      Tip: Objectives can have one vertical alignment and multiple horizontal alignments. A key result can have one vertical alignment.

      Navigation

      Click the Modules menu icon in the upper right corner, then select the Objectives module. 

      ObjectivesModule-1

      Aligning an Objective

      When adding a new objective or editing an existing one, select the alignment field. An objective can be aligned horizontally to other objectives, or vertically to the corporate strategy. 

      ObjectiveAlignmentMenu

      Important!! When Directly Aligning at the Objective level, all Key Results within your objective will inherit the same Type and Measure (ie: Metric/Percentage or Milestone/Numeric) as the aligned Corporate Key Result. The majority of Objectives contain Key Results of mixed types, in which case it is best to align at the Key Result level as shown in the "Vertically Aligning A Key Result" section of this article. Click here to jump ahead.

      Horizontally Aligning an Objective

      Select the horizontal alignment option, then search for the objective(s) you wish to align to by title or person. You can horizontally align to one or multiple objectives by clicking the Align button and then clicking Apply. 

      Note: When editing an objective or key result and selecting horizontal alignment, you can also select any other objective or key result that you own (not the OKR you are currently editing).


      HorizontallyAlignObjective

      The purpose of horizontal alignment is to easily have visibility on progress using the hierarchy view. There are two ways to view Horizontal Alignment in the hierarchy view.

      1. View an objective's horizontal alignment through My Objectives

        • When in My Objectives, click on Horizontal Alignment shown in the lower right of the objective.

      kb-horizalign.myobj

        • Click the info (i) button in hierarchy view to open the horizontally aligned objective.

      kb-horizalign.myobj2

      2. View an objective's horizontal alignment through Corporate Strategy

        • When in Corporate Strategy, viewing the Quarterly Key Result of your choosing, click on the horizontally aligned objective, which in the example below is shown on the far right, third down. Horizontal alignments in corporate strategy are shown using a grey dotted line with an arrow.

      KB screenshots-1

      kb-horizalign.cs1

      Vertically Aligning an Objective

      Select the vertical alignment option, then apply any desired filters to find the company-level key result or long term key result to align your objective. 

      When vertically aligning your objective, you may align two different ways. The reason you'd want to vertically align a whole objective is if all of your Key Results are the same type of information. For example, Sales teams KR's being broken down into different regions. You should align Key Results individually by editing the KR and selecting alignment within the Edit KR sidebar window if each KR tracks different types of data.

        • Direct Contributor: Objective progress directly calculates into company-level key result progress.
          • If the Key Result is a Numeric type, all contributing key results will be added together. For example, if Sales teams are all trying to increase sales and they each have their own quotas, they should each have a designated numeric KR that will be added together for the Objective.  It is important to coordinate the start and target values with the corporate key result owner to assure the values are realistic across all expected contributors.
          • If the Key Result is a Percentage type, all contributing key results will be averaged. For example, tracking completion of a course as KR's for each individual learner will be averaged together.
        • Indirect Contributor: Objective progress supports, but does not calculate into company-level key result progress.   An example of an indirect alignment would be a marketing KR counting leads against a corporate sales goal KR counting revenue dollars.  You want to show your contribution but not calculate leads into the revenue KR.

      VerticalAlignObjective

      Note: Long Term Company-Level Key Results can only be aligned to indirectly.

      Vertically Aligning a Key Result

      Edit a new or existing key result to access supporting details and advanced fields for the key result. 

      EditKRButton-2

      Select the alignment field and the vertical alignment option. Apply any desired filters to find the company-level key result or long term key result to align your key result.

      When vertically aligning your key result, you may align two different ways. 

        • Direct Contributor: Objective progress directly calculates into company-level key result progress. 
          • If the Key Result is a Numeric type, all contributing key results will be added together. For example, if Sales teams are all trying to increase sales and they each have their own quotas, they should each have a designated numeric KR that will be added together for the Objective.
          • If the Key Result is a Percentage type, all contributing key results will be averaged. For example, tracking completion of a course as KR's for each individual learner will be averaged together.
      • When Direct alignment is selected, your Key Result will automatically inherit the Type and Measure of the aligned Strategic Key Result. For example, if you align to a Metric/Numeric Key Result tracking Dollars ($), your Key Result will automatically change to Metric/Numeric with a label of "Dollars." 
      • If you directly align to a Percentage based Strategic Key Result, your Key Result will automatically be set to track percentage (0-100%). You may also select the "Activity Completion" Measure which will automatically update the progress percentage based on activity completion. 
      • To change the Measure of a Directly aligned Key Result to Numeric, remove the alignment and consider resetting the alignment as Indirect, or leave the Key Result unaligned.

        • Indirect Contributor: Objective progress supports, but does not calculate into company-level key result progress. 


      KRAlignment

      View Alignment Details

      After setting the vertical or horizontal alignment for your objective, you can view the details for the alignment by selecting the alignment indicator within the alignment field. 

      Additional options for removing alignment and viewing hierarchy are available when viewing the alignment details. 

      ViewingAlignment

      Once an objective or key result is aligned, you will be able to view Vertical Alignment hierarchy in the Company-Level Key Result Hierarchy page from the Objective side panel. You can view Objective alignment at the top of the side panel and Key Result alignment below each KR in the side panel.