The 'Sidebar'

The Sidebar is a quick and easy way to view and edit your Objectives or its success criteria. Just about anywhere you can find objectives or its success criteria, you can open the Sidebar. While "these sidebars" are more prominent in the workspace, there is also the Planner Sidebar which lists the quick view of the plans in the Alignments page (View the Alignment of your Plans).

The Sidebar will give you access to everything you need to update your Objective’s progress, owner, or Strategic Contribution, custom fields, add a comment, preview of the goal-hub, and also view a feed of recent updates to it. This allows you to get into the details of a goal from anywhere in Cascade, and also stay wherever you have been working! You can click the Pencil icon at the top-right to edit the information in the Sidebar.

While the Objective Sidebar has Details, Success Criteria, Updates, Risks (and Relationships in Enterprise tiers) tabs, the Action and Measure Sidebar has only the Details, Updates, and Risks (also Relationships in Enterprise tiers) tabs!

What can I do in the Sidebar?

• View the actual progress
• View the health and status information of a project or action
• Add Success Criteria (Projects, Measures, Actions, Contributing Objectives)
• Progress updates with comments
• View contributing elements, strategic contribution and assign weights to determine the progress of objectives
• Populate data against custom fields, if a custom field template is applied (See Populate Data against Custom Fields for more information!)
• Post and view updates to keep the team informed
• Add and view risks, mitigations
• Add and view relationships
• Add and view comments

View progress in Goal Hub:

You can see a preview of the line chart from the goal-hub, however click or click Open goal hub from the three dots against the title to view the progress and other details from the goal hub page. See The Goal Hub for more information.

Add Success Criteria:

Click the three dots to add success criteria to the Objective.

While with the case of Actions or Measures, you can only see options under Actions here, with Projects, you can also add an action from the three-dots menu!

You can also do this from + Add Success Criteria option!

Progress updates with comments:

Hover the mouse over the progress bar to know about the actual and expected progress. To update the progress on an objective, go to the Success Criteria tab and, click into the progress bar of an action or measure. Update the progress as desired, add a comment, then click Save.

View status information for "actions" and "projects":

The status information from the Kanban board is fed into the sidebar of all the actions. When you change the status of an action, it'll automatically reflect in both these places, irrespective of where you do it!

Remember that irrespective of the status that is set manually, you can still update progress of an action manually, or with checklists and milestones, or integrations till the health is "Achieved"! See The 'Kanban' Board article for more information!

Viewing contributing elements:

From the Details tab, expand the Contributes to option to view the Plan and the Focus area. Click on the plan to view it from the Planner page, and on the Focus area to view it from the Focus Area page.

The Success criteria tab displays all of the contributing elements of a given objective. While clicking on any of these projects, actions or measures take you to the relevant Sidebar, clicking on + Add tracking or Add collaborators will take you to the relevant areas in the Edit Sidebar view! You can manually slide the progress bar to update progress!

You can add weights to the success criteria to determine the progress calculation of the objective. See Add Weights to define the progress of your objectives article for more information!

Post and view updates:

You can view or post updates from the Updates tab. Click Post Update to make an update on an objective/measure/action to keep the team informed. You can add text (apply styles, bullets, alignment), attach links or embed videos. 

A snapshot of the objective/measure/action is taken when an update is posted, so that you can view them anytime and analyze the progress or updates at a later time. This update will also be posted under the Recent Updates area on the Home page of every user in that workspace!

Add and view risks:

You can add or view risks and it associated mitigations. Click Add Risks, and add title, description, and so on - see the Add Risks article for details.

You can drag and drop the risks between Open and Closed sections, and also mark mitigations as complete, when done!

Add and view relationships:

You can add or view relationships between initiatives. Click Add relationship, and select a relationship type, add description, and so on - see the Add Relationships article for details. From the three dots against the title, click View alignment to see the Objective alignment map or the drill down view of an objective with its feeding elements and relationships! 

Add and view comments:

You can add comments by clicking into the comment box visible at the bottom of the Sidebar. Type in the desired comment, tag teams or users, then click Comment. You can view the comments posted too!

Overall, the Sidebar gives you a contextual insight into the entities. It gives you a complete picture of the performance and any anticipated deviations! The comments, and updates helps you and your teams to collaborate and align towards the outcome!