Integrating Microsoft Viva Goals and Project for the Web

Microsoft Viva Goals is a goal-setting and management solution that allows your teams to align their work to the overall organization’s strategic priorities, thus driving results and improving your business.

Through the application of objectives and key results (OKRs), Viva Goals enables both individuals and businesses to effectively structure and monitor their objectives. By immersing all stakeholders in the company’s overarching mission and primary focal points, Viva Goals cultivates a dynamic environment wherein employees are invested in shared objectives, nurturing a culture of purposeful engagement and collaborative pursuit of accomplishments.

Microsoft now offers users the ability to integrate Project data with Viva Goals. This means that you can combine the OKR framework with project management principles. This article explores the new functionality and provides a user case as an example.

A previous article we wrote on the goal setting feature in Project for the Web provided methodological insights and discussed the definition of goals in PftW. We found the new functionality useful, considering it to be a first step in initiating strategic thinking within the project context; however, it isn’t fully equipped for OKRs. It lacks crucial requirements such as a two-layer hierarchy for defining OKRs, as well as tracking functionality and the reviewing cycle.

Viva Goals, the Microsoft OKR solution, addresses these concerns. However, it still wasn’t possible to define a detailed action plan to execute key results. The initiative elements don’t provide sufficient detail and functionality.

With the newly released connection now, it’s possible to integrate project data into the OKR set. Let’s explore this through an example.

The first thing we need is to define an objective and its key results, for example:

We define this set in Viva Goals. However, achieving the necessary results to succeed, especially with a stretch OKR, is unlikely without an action plan. To resolve this, we can define a project in Microsoft PftW that will bring the key results as benefits of its execution.

We call it the “Summer Plan,” and it includes detailed steps and actions to achieve the results.

We also define the benefits of executing the project in the business case and the goals to achieve the key results.

Now we have the OKR defined, as well as a detailed project plan, but they aren’t connected, and they’re defined in different platforms. This makes tracking and reporting more difficult. This is where the new ability to integrate Viva Goals and Project comes in.

We want to nest the initiative (project) and its tasks under a key result. To enable this, we need to configure it in the admin settings of Viva Goals.

Now, to assign the tasks that contribute to each key result, we define buckets in the project board. This allows us to select them during the integration process.

With both the project and OKRs ready, we can import the tasks we want to track for key result completion. We add a child item under the key result, adding the initiative.

This opens the New Initiative Dialog Box, where we name it “Article Milestones-Summer Plan.“ We click “add task“ to break down the initiative, select “Automatically from data source,“ and choose the “Project for the web“ option:

This opens the import dialog where we choose the project and tasks we want to integrate under the key result. We select the correct environment, the project, and the previously defined bucket, and then click “Next.“

It returns to the new initiative dialog box, showing the selected configuration. If everything is correct, we save it and complete the process:

Finally, we can see how the key result has an initiative nested with tasks that are automatically updated.

If we click on the initiative, we can see the progress according to the status of the project plan:

PMO teams often find themselves manually collating data to identify valuable insights and information for project teams and leaders to make informed decisions.

Just like with the advent of PPM tooling, this evolution continues to bring automation into the PMO world, reducing the amount of manual labor required to track key metrics. With the ease of collecting data through automation, however, confusion sometimes arises about who needs to do what with the information.

Some clear tips for your PMO to begin using these new tool sets:

1. Accept that your internal PMO customers will probably want to implement these things as it makes their lives easier.
2. Take the time to learn and understand what this tool is and how it can help your team.
3. Look at the possibilities for the day-to-day and monthly cadence where this tool can help you.
4. Update your SOPs to reflect the use of the new tools, check your status reports to see if you are duplicating information, and remember that when implementing something new, just enough is sometimes just enough.

With the new Project for the Web connector in Viva Goals, we can now integrate project data and task details within our OKR set, enabling automatic updates of the OKRs based on the project’s status. This allows us to focus on business priorities, eliminating the need for manual updates.

Through this integration, Viva Goals becomes the single source of truth for tracking the progress of your organization’s OKRs and the strategic projects aligned with them. This means we can merge the strategic layer of OKRs with the tactical layer of project management, bringing the best of both worlds together.

For more details, you can visit Task history, goal-setting and more in Microsoft Project.