Create Time Periods or Horizons

Whether you're a strategic leader responsible for growth or an operational leader overlooking the operations, executing a business strategy requires mapping of operational activities like planning, reporting, budgeting or forecasting, etc., over multiple time periods. You'll need to provide meaningful progress reporting to executives against horizons or time scales to analyze the performance trend and highlight the achievements or blockers or reallocate resources to reflect the shift in priorities. To provide a layer of governance in your strategy lifecycle, and to address your pain point of assigning timelines to individual goals which is a manual and time intensive process, we've now enabled setting up global and default time periods for your workspace.

Once configured, these time horizons can be used to quickly assign timelines to goals. In other words, you can now create goals and quickly select the predefined date periods that reflect your strategy and governance cycles. By mapping the goals to time periods, you can now focus attention on priorities for a given cycle, and report progress within horizons while at the same time maintaining visibility on the historical performance.

This is an early release of the feature and watch this space for any enhancements.

How to configure time horizons?

1. From the profile picture/initials, click Admin > Settings > Time horizons tab.

2. Click + New time horizon.

Give the time horizon a title (Q3, FY2023, H1 2024, etc.,), and choose the relevant Start date and End date.

1. Click Add.

The created time horizons will be displayed in chronological order (i.e., by end date).

How to apply time periods to goals?

Once configured, the date picker (in the Planner or Sidebar) in the goals of your plans will show the time horizons added to your workspace in the Horizons tab. And, you can quickly select and apply those to your goals. The Custom tab will allow precise dates to be set with the standard date picker. See Time Horizons and Plans for details on date and progress filters.

Once a horizon is assigned to an objective, any success criteria created will inherit the horizon or dates from the objective. If desired, you can override these by choosing precise dates from the standard date picker in the "Custom" tab.

A few points to note:

• Each time horizon must be manually defined, and are independent of one another (i.e., no default, repeating or nested horizons).

• You can apply only one horizon to a goal at a time.

• Also, you cannot set horizons to goals in bulk.

• If there're date filters applied to your plan, then the goals will default to those dates. See Time Horizons and Plans for details.

• The date picker shows the time horizons in ascending order that end after today’s date.

• The historical time horizons that end prior to today’s date are returned by search.

• If you had set dates to your goals already in your workspace, once you add horizons, you need to then manually reassign those goals to these new horizons, as required.

• These new horizons will not be available downstream in reports or dashboards at this point in time.

How to manage time horizons?

If you wish to edit or delete a time horizon, you can do so from Admin > Time horizons. Alternately, you can click the date picker in the Planner and click the (Edit time horizon) icon in the bottom of the Horizons tab to take you to the Time horizons page.

If you wish to edit the time horizons,

• Either, click the three dots against the horizon, and click Edit to edit the title or dates.

• Or, click on the time horizon and drag from the center of the tile to reposition its timelines.

• Or, click on the time horizon and drag the end of the end of the tiles to adjust or reposition its timelines.

Click Save changes to reflect the changes.

When you edit the time horizons, it'll update the date ranges of any corresponding goals so the dates remain in sync. In the goal's date picker, you'll see that the dates are updated in the edited time horizon.

If you wish to delete a time horizon, click the three dots against it and click Delete to delete them permanently from the workspace. However, deleting time horizons will not impact the date range of any corresponding goals, and the dates will be retained. In the goal's date picker, you'll see that the dates are retained and displayed in the Custom tab.

FAQs

Can I set time horizons in bulk to all the goals in a plan?

No. You need to do it individually either from the inline date picker or the sidebar.

If an existing goal has a start and end date of a particular horizon, will it automatically be tagged to that newly created horizon?

No, you need to manually choose the relevant time horizon from the date picker's Horizons tab.

Can time horizons be applied at plan or focus area level?

No, plans and focus areas are essentially ‘timeless’ features that don’t support the concept of time being attached.

Can we assign two horizons to the same goal? For example, FY2024 and Q1 2024?

No, you can assign only one time horizon to a goal at a time.

Once applied to objectives, will the success criteria automatically default to the same horizon?

Yes. Once a horizon is assigned to an objective, any success criteria created will inherit the horizon or dates from the objective. If desired, you can override these by choosing precise dates from the standard date picker in the Custom tab.

I'm seeing different dates in the entities where time horizons are applied while my team member who created it is seeing the correct horizon.

This might be because of the different time zones that you and your team member are in. Sometimes you might also see a warning "Dates must fall within the date range of the parent" if the user that created the goal is in a different time zone to the user viewing them. It is all relative to the time zone of the user logging in, and will reflect differently if they travel to the other side of the world.

To be more clear, here is an example - When a user creates a new time horizon, the start time is set to 00:00 in their local time and the end time is set to 23:59 in their local time.
This means that when you create the 2024 time horizon, it'll take a start date of 1/1/24 at 00:00 EST and an end date of 12/31/24 at 23:59 EST. And when this time horizon is applied to a goal, you'll see the correct dates.
Any user that logs in will see this date/time converted into their local time zone. If a user logging in that is on Pacific Time (PST) will see a start date of 12/31/23 on that goal. This is because 1/1/24 at 00:00 EST is 12/31/23 at 21:00 PST. The PST user will actually see the date as one day off because you created it in your timezone, which they fall a few hours behind.
However, this same user in PST would see the same end date. This is because 12/31/24 EST at 23:59 is 12/31/24 PST at 20:59. They will see the same day, because it still converts to the same day in their local time. Any user in EST will however see the same dates as you.

Please note that this is an intended behavior and we're looking to implement a global workspace setting for the user to set the timezone to solve this issue.