Microsoft Viva Goals (formerly Ally, or Ally.io) was a Strategic Goal-Planning & Execution Management software. Ally.io became a Microsoft brand after the October 2021 acquisition, and is slated for retirement December 2025.
$48
per year per user
Weekdone
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Weekdone is software built around the best practices of the OKR goal-setting methodology and with an aim to speed up teams’ OKR learning curve, by providing high-quality educational materials and team-tailored OKR coaching throughout the implementation process. Weekdone is headquartered in Tartu, Estonia.
I believe Ally.io to be one of the best OKR software tools available and it can be deployed easily to small, medium, large enterprises. The tool is easily scalable and its implementation can be deployed without necessarily having a pilot test. I can not find scenarios where it would not be appropriate.
Weekdone is an incredible tool for helping teams see what their future plans are and the progress that has been made to get accomplish those plans. We use the platform for a way to track things we're working on during the quarter by breaking them down into weekly tasks. It is helpful that we can link each task to our quarterly objectives and set a due date. We can also tag colleagues in our plans and add comments and/or attachments for easy sharing throughout the organization.
The default state of transparency. This helps in reinforcing the superpower of OKRs. In Ally.io, the default mode of any objective created is public (unless stated otherwise). This helps people across the organization to understand where and how the organization is progressing.
The above feature of transparency is also reinforced by the feature of creating dependencies. This allows for people to understand the parties involved in achieving a particular goal and creates accountability. It is clearly understood which party has not contributed enough and RCA can be done on the same.
It allows for integrating with a host of other tools such that the check-in process can be automated. This allows for reducing the effort of managers in terms of updating multiple tools.
The dashboarding feature has helped us in reducing effort spent in creating presentations for retros, planning, and demos
Ally.io's customer success team is among the best that I have worked it. Always ready to help, proactive, and up for the next challenge. They take the success of their customers extremely seriously. Kudos to the team for this attitude.
User setup and management and team/department creation is not a trivial effort. Requires some deliberate planning.
The deadlines for plans don't connect to the due dates for tasks in systems of record. That can get confusing when Asana says a task is due next week but Weekdone still has a due date of tomorrow.
I'd love to see more contextual support for sections like employee feedback. Maybe a sentence or two suggesting feedback based on the report's weekly entry. If a person had three Problems and only one Progress, Weekdone could suggest some corrective action to make it easier for the management to mitigate problems before they get ugly.
We have a lunch and learn session with Weekdone next week so they can share their tips and tricks for making the most out of the platform. Since we have been using the platform for a while already, this will be helpful so we can ensure we are making the most of the tool.
Weekdone started as a pilot within a single team so we didn't have a formal evaluation and selection process. When the pilot was over, we had developed a skill and affinity for the tool with no clear objections, so no other tools were considered. Our process for regular evaluation of incumbent technology at renewal time asks us to consider the cost to value ratio and user adoption/satisfaction. I don't anticipate there being any reason to consider alternatives, other than the long term viability of small software companies.
