Ever wonder if your contributions complement the overall success of your organization? Are your efforts adding values to the devised plan? These lead to the answers on alignment.
The visibility into the company's strategic plan and objectives to every team member across various levels will definitely contribute to the company's success. Rather than a top-down approach, a bottom-up, collaborative, aligned approach defines the company's success story.
Why is alignment important?
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To ensure your work is aligned with the company's vision and objectives.
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To understand how your efforts impact and contribute to the high-level plans.
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To identify gaps and risks in the execution of the plans.
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To make informed decisions on prioritizing work and effectiveness.
With Cascade, you can see every plan made in your workspace from a birds eye view. You can view the alignments in either of two ways:
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Click
from the left navigation pane, and click Plans tab. -
From the All plans page or Planners page of a specific plan: Click the three dots against the 'plan name', and click View alignment. In the Align tab, it'll zoom-in to highlight the plan and its alignments with the rest of the plans in the background.
The "Objectives" tab displays the objective alignment map showing the objectives and their contributing relationships. See View the Alignment of your Objectives for details.
You'll see a simple tree structure that gives an instant view of the plans, focus areas, objectives, alignments, risks, and lets you to analyze how the different plans are aligned and progressing across your organization.
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Click Expand All to see all the plans, both aligned and unaligned. (Aligned plans mean they've parent plans, while unaligned plans mean they do not have any parent plans) |
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Click Collapse All to see only the highest-level plans in your workspace. |
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If Show Unaligned Plans check-box is selected, then the unaligned plans (in the above example picture, it's the "Legal Plan") in your workspace will be displayed along with the aligned plans. If it is not selected, the you'll see only the aligned plans here. Also, if the parent plan is set to private and you do not have access to it, even then the child plan will appear unaligned. |
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Select Show shared objectives check-box to display all the objectives that are shared across different plans. (This is detailed later in this article.) |
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Click the node point to collapse or expand the alignments of that particular plan. When collapsed, the node displays the numeric values, i.e., the number of child plans aligned with that parent plan. |
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This tile indicates the health score of the plan, which is calculated based on the performance of the focus areas and objectives in it. Based on the score, the colors vary. If the score is between
Please note that these scores are arrived based on the calculations done in Cascade. |
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This tile shows the alignment score i.e., percentage of aligned objectives in a plan. Alignment score of a plan = (No of Aligned objectives in a plan / Total no of objectives in that plan) * 100,
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Hover over each symbol to see the number of objectives at risk, number of focus areas, and the total number of objectives in that plan. Also, if you've access to a private plan, you'll see Private displayed below the plan name. |
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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.View Plan Details:
Click on a particular plan to know its alignment, and click View Plan Details to view its details from the Planner Sidebar.
You can get a high-level view of the plan along with the relative health of focus areas on that plan. Click the three dots to edit the plan details from the Plan Settings or click View Plan to navigate to the Planner page.
View Shared Objectives:
Click on the shared objective to know its alignment across plans, its health, and click on the Shared Objective box to open that objective in Sidebar.
The Contributes to area displays the parent plan, focus area and the linked plan and focus area of the shared objective. You can do all the things that you do on a Edit Objective Sidebar - change dates, add/remove collaborators, update progress, add comments, and so on from here as well.
Alignment score:
The alignment score of a plan shows how top-level objectives are connected. Objectives are considered aligned when they either contribute to another objective or to a focus area shared with the parent plan.
Alignment score of a plan = (No of Aligned objectives in a plan / Total no of objectives in that plan) * 100,
where aligned objectives are those
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objectives that fall under the same or different focus areas that're shared with the direct parent plan, and
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objectives that're "contributors to" some other objective in any plan. This can be seen from the Relationship tab of its sidebar.
Note that the shared or linked objectives will only add to the score if they either contribute to another objective, or are in a focus area that is aligned with the parent plan.
FAQs
Can we change the order of plans in this view?
No, the plans are listed in a random order in this page and you cannot change or reorder plans.
Why're the plans shown in different colors?
The health score of the plans is calculated by taking the average of progress scores of the objectives in that plan and converted to a scale of 10. If the score is
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0-3.3, then the color is red - denotes the health is "At Risk"
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3.4-6.6, then the color is orange - denotes the health is "Behind"
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6.7-10, then the color is green - denotes the health is "On Track".
How's privacy handled?
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If a plan is set to private i.e., no access, then the users who do not have access to that plan will not see them in this Alignment page. In other words, you'll see only the plans that you've access to.
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If you do not have access to a parent plan that is set to private, then the child plans will appear unaligned.
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If you've access to a private plan, then you'll see Private displayed below the plan name.