Overview

The WorkBoard Alignment cycle is an AI-driven tool that enhances cross-team alignment and coordination at scale.

The Alignment cycle streamlines strategy execution by scanning OKRs across the organization, and identifying Objective and Key Result alignment opportunities for each team. It helps uncover dependencies and collaboration opportunities —saving hours of manual review by leveraging AI for seamless scanning and auditing.

Key features

• Actionable Insights for alignment: The tool surfaces specific recommendations for each team to improve cross-functional alignment on both Objectives and Key Results.
• Alignment cycle tie-off: The cycle should be triggered centrally by an Administrator in accordance with your organization's OKR alignment schedule to maximize opportunity for cross-functional tie-off.
• Easy interaction: Teams can quickly accept, reject, or request a discussion about AI-generated suggestions.

How It Works

Admin triggers an Alignment cycle

The end of the OKR drafting period for your organization is the perfect time to surface cross-functional alignment opportunities and conduct tie-off conversations. To facilitate this process, an organization administrator (requires the WorkBoard Governance role) can generate an Alignment cycle.

Viewing Alignment opportunities

Once an Alignment cycle has been started, alignment opportunities are made visible to team Managers, Co-Managers, and Admins.

• Managers, co-managers, and admins of teams within the cycle scope will receive notifications via Email, Slack, & Microsoft Teams.
• Managers will also see a new Action Card on their My Objectives page linking to the Alignment opportunieis for their teams.

Aligning Objectives & Key results

Once a manager accesses the Alignment opportunities page, they will see a list of the teams they manage, and within each team, a list of AI-suggested alignment opportunities. These include:

• Suggested Objective alignments.
• Suggested Key Result support relationships.

For each suggestion, users can:

• Accept: The alignment is added to the system.
• Dismiss: The suggestion is removed.
• Modify relationship type: Users can adjust the suggested alignment if it makes more sense to use a different relationship type.

Steps to generate an Alignment cycle

To generate a new Alignment cycle, an Admin user takes the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Governance page.
2. Select Alignment cycle.
3. Decide which teams should receive a notification as part of the cycle:
1. Entire Organization
2. Specific sub-orgs under a manager (coming soon!)
4. Set the duration for how long in-app reminders should show on team managers' My Objectives page.
5. Name the cycle or use the default naming convention.
6. Click Generate to create the Alignment cycle.

Admins can view active and past cycles through the Governance page. Each shows:

• The cycle start and end date.
• The number of accepted recommendations.
• The user who triggered the Alignment cycle

FAQ

Q: Can I customize the suggestions?
A: Yes, users can modify suggested relationships before accepting them.

Q: How often is the Alignment cycle generated?
A: Alignment cycles are triggered by an admin user. They can be run as frequently as possible based on what works best for your organization's OKR alignment cycle.

Q: What Objectives and Key Results are included?
A: The Alignment opportunity page shows suggestions Objectives and Key Results that are for the current period -- effectively your open OKRs.

Q: What happens when I dismiss a suggestion?
A: The suggestion is removed from your alignment opportunities, and will not be recommended again in the same cycle.