View the Alignment of your Objectives

To give you a visual context on how aligned are your objectives, and to see how connected are your functional units to the organizational strategy, the objective alignment map would help you to look at the bigger picture, and make guided decisions. The map shows the breakdown of the top-level objectives of your plan, thereby letting you know how vertically and horizontally aligned is your work.

This objective alignment is important

• to understand how your efforts impact and contribute to the top-level objectives,

• to see how operational objectives connect to strategic outcomes,

• to revise and adapt goals easily as the strategy evolves, and

• to provide visibility, clarity, and context and help in making informed decisions.

Click Alignment from the left navigation pane, or click (View alignment) from the three dots against the objective (from anywhere in the workspace - Sidebar, goal hub, planner, etc.), and you can see the objective alignment map in the Align > Objectives tab. The Plans tab shows the hierarchy of plans and their alignment.

Prerequisites:

• You need to create objectives for the objective alignment map to show up. If you do not have any objectives created, you can do so from here - click Create an objective.

• Add objectives nested as success criteria under the high-level objectives to visualize them in this alignment map.

Add relationships to your objectives from the Relationships tab of their sidebar. You can also add relationships from the Alignment page - you can find the details later in this article in the section How to build out a map with relationships from the Alignment page.

Objective Alignment Map:

The Alignment > Align > Objectives tab will give you an instant view of the top-level objectives and the objectives that share a nested and contributing relationship with them, and lets you analyze how the different objectives are aligned.

	The Filter makes it easier to pinpoint specific objectives in the alignment map based on the selections you make. Expand Filter, and you can see options to filter by Plan - Highlights the objectives that're owned by that plan. Note that shared objectives will not be highlighted here, and it'll show up only in the plans where they're originally created. Focus area - Highlights the objectives that're housed within those focus areas. Health - Based on the selection (At risk, Behind, On track, Achieved, Not started, Not tracked), those objectives who've the relevant health will be highlighted with colored strips on their nodes. This'll help you to prioritize and adapt early in the cycle. Type - Choose the type (See Add Goal Types: Advance Strategy Model Customization) to highlight those objectives (of that type) in the alignment map. If you're filtering by a combination of data, i.e., plan and focus area, or plan and health, or plan, health and type, or plan, focus area and health, and so on, based on these combinations, only the relevant objectives would be displayed in the alignment map.
	The Objectives lists all the "nested" and "contributor" objectives and their count - All, Aligned (that contributes to an objective), and Unaligned (do not contribute to any objective). Expand the relevant tab to show the details. You can also search for an objective by entering the text into the search bar - if its unaligned, it'll show up in the Objectives panel, and if aligned, its path will be highlighted in the alignment map.   Click on an objective tile, and click the to navigate to the drill down view. See The 'Drilldown' View for details. to add relationship - search and choose the objective to which you need the contributor relationship added, and give a description. You can "swap" the direction of contribution too.   Once the relationship is added for this unaligned objective, it'll be removed from the list here, and added to the objective alignment map. to open the objective's sidebar, and Click + Add success criteria > New objective, if you wish to add a "nested" objective, which'll then be added to the alignment map. Click + Add success criteria > Existing objective or add "contributor" relationship from the Relationships tab, if you wish to add a "contributing" objective. This'll be added to the alignment view as well.
	Click on an objective tile in the map to highlight its contribution path. The connecting nodes indicate the count of objectives that share a nested and contributing relationship with the parent objective. This path is also highlighted when you search for the aligned objective from the search bar. Click the icon to navigate to the drill down view of the objectives. You can add relationship from the + icon and open its sidebar (to view the context, or add nested and contributor objectives) from the sidebar icon. Hover the mouse over any of the objective tile to bring up these icons.
	The details on an objective tile are: The top-level plan to which the objective belongs to. Objective's title. Type assigned to the objective (See Add Goal Tags: Advance Strategy Model Customization for details). End date of the objective. If Time Horizon is applied, then it'll display the horizon title. Hover the mouse over the dates to see the start and end dates. Owner assigned to the objective. Count of plans and focus areas its shared with, and the count of measures, actions and projects associated with it. Please note that only the top-level actions (and not those under projects) are included in this number.  Health of the objective.
	Expand the Date filter to filter the entire map to display only those objectives that are active during the selected time frame. You can select a custom date range or a Time Horizon.
	The mini-map in the bottom left corner indicates your current position on the map, relative to the other elements on the visualization. Click into the mini-map, and drag the '"viewport" area to re-orient your position on the map. This'll be useful when your alignment map is huge - just click into the mini-map, and drag the map to look into the relevant area in the main map.
	Click the Plans tab to view the alignment of plans. See View the Alignment of your Plans for details.
	Click Expand all or Collapse all to expand and collapse the branching views in the alignment map. When collapsed, you'll only see the first column of objectives with the count of objectives that share "nested" and "contributor" relationships with them. Hover the mouse over the objective count pill or click the icon to expand that objective's branch to view its contributor objectives.
	Click to fit the display to screen, or adjust the percentage to zoom in or zoom out. You can make use of the mouse/touch interface/keyboard controls to play around the page display.

How to build out a map with relationships from here:

If you do not have any nested objectives or objective contributor relationships added, then in the Objective Alignment map, you'll just see the objectives that appear on the top-level plans (i.e. plans without parents) and which have at least one child plan. These objectives will be displayed in the first ‘column’ of nodes, starting from center-left of screen. This is assumed to be the ‘top level’ plan(s) for the workspace.

Now, expand the Unaligned objectives, search and choose the objective with which you wish to add the contributor relationship.

When you select an objective, with the plus icon, you can add the contributing relationship:

• Set the direction of the relationship with the Swap option.

• Search for an objective to connect to.

• Add a description for context.

Click Create to attach the unaligned objective to an existing node on the map in real time.

Another way is to add nested or contributor objectives from the Unaligned objective's sidebar.

• In the Unaligned tab, click on the objective tile, and click the (Sidebar) icon.

• Click + Add success criteria > New objective, and add an objective nested under the parent objective as a success criteria.

• Or, click + Add success criteria > Existing objective, and add an objective contributing to the parent objective.

Once the nesting and contribution relationships are built out, this will create a ‘tree’ of objectives broken down from the left-to-right.

FAQs

How do I visualize the shared objectives in this map?

If an objective is shared between multiple plans, then it will listed in the count of plans displayed in the objective tile details.

Also, you can click the icon when you hover the mouse over the objective to open the objective in the drill down view. There, you'll see dotted lines between the objectives and the plans that they're shared with - Shared objectives. You can get to this view from the Planner, Sidebar or goal hub of an objective from the three dots against it and clicking the (View alignment icon).

You can also look into this detail from the Plans tab - click the Shared objectives check-box.

I already have contributing objectives added in my workspace. Why are they not appearing here?

You'll need to manually add "contributor" relationship from the objective's sidebar to visualize them here in the alignment map. See Add Relationships to learn how to add relationship from the sidebar.

What happens if I use multiple filters?

Applying "multiple filter types together" works like And, whereas "setting multiple values for a given filter" works like Or.

For example, if the "Plan" is Corporate Strategy, and the "Focus Areas" selected are Customer Experience and Market Leadership, then the map displays only the objective nodes on the Corporate Strategy plan AND within the focus areas Customer Experience OR Market Leadership.

Also, note that the plan and focus area filters use ‘nested’ logic so defining parameters for one filter restricts available options for the other filter. For example, if the "Plan" is Corporate Strategy, then only the focus areas in that plan will be available in the Focus area filter list. In the same way, if the "Focus area" is Customer Experience, then only those plans that share this focus area will be available in the Plan filter list.

How is privacy handled?

If you've private plans in your workspace, and have edit/view permissions, then you can see the objectives contribution here. If you do not have edit/view permissions, then you'll see Private objective with a lock symbol indicating that the contributing objective resides in a private plan.