You can make complex goals more manageable by breaking them down into smaller, more focused objectives: nested objectives. This makes them easier to tackle and allows you to assign specific, actionable tasks to individual team members. The progress of these smaller objectives, along with other key success criteria, then contributes to the overall success and health of the main, high-level goal.
How to add a nested objective?
You can add a nested objective from
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Planner page: click the purple + icon under the parent objective, and click New objective. The name of the objective will vary depending on if you have created different objective types, and you will be able to add a nested objective, provided that you have enabled the objective type as success criteria for that same element. See Using Types to Structure Strategy
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Objective's sidebar: click the success criteria tab, and then "Add" at the bottom.
Enter the details like due date, collaborators, and description. You can then create its own success criteria - objectives, measures, projects and actions. These nested objectives with their own success criteria and the success criteria of the high level objective aggregate to the progress and health of the parent objective.
Visual representation of the added nested objective:
In the Planner, they'll look similar to the high level or parent objective.
In the Sidebar, this objective will be displayed in the Success criteria tab.
In the Alignment page, you'll see the nested objectives displayed as child nodes to the parent objective. In this example, the nested objective is an objective type named "Project".
See Add Objectives to the Focus Areas to know more on managing objectives.
How does progress and health transfer to the parent objective?
When you add a nested objective, there's the usual flow of progress and health to the parent objective, i.e., average of all the success criteria - actions, measures, projects, nested and contributing objectives.
You can customize the progress calculation with the custom weighting option in the Success criteria tab of the parent objective's sidebar.
See Add Weights to define the Progress of your Objectives for more information.
How to change a high level objective to a nested objective in another plan?
If you've created an objective at a high level but now you want this to be nested under another objective, then you can do it this way:
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Edit that objective from its sidebar.
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Under Parent in the Contributes to section, click Edit against the plan details.
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From the dropdown, select Objective. And, select the relevant objective from the list.
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Click Save. You'll see that this objective is now nested under the objective you chose from the list.
If the high level objective is a "shared objective", then, from the Contributes to section, you need to first unlink the plans and focus areas with which they're shared, and then go ahead to choose the relevant objective under which it needs to be nested. But, once nested, they cannot be shared. So, the best practice in this case, would be to add that objective as a contribution to the relevant objective, thereby still having it shared across plans and focus areas.
Or, you can do the same with the easy Move flow. Click the three dots against the relevant objective, and click Move.
In the Move this objective modal, click Under another objective option.
Search for the relevant objective from the list, and click Confirm. The objective will now be nested under the chosen objective.
How to delete a nested objective:
You can delete the nested objective in the same way like you delete a regular objective: from the three dots against it, click Delete.
FAQs
How many levels of objective nesting are supported?
Though you can add any number of objective nesting, we recommend you to be judicious and limit the number of layers to avoid the plans becoming too deep and siloing work into a single team.
Can nested objectives be shared to other plans?
"Nested objectives" cannot be shared with other objectives, plans or focus areas. This can break its contribution to parent objective.