Highly effective OKR management tool
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Initially, only the Product and Engineering teams used Ally to manage quarterly objectives. Recently, the entire company started to use this tool to align on objectives.
Ally helps us:
<ul><li>Be transparent about goals.</li><li>Be accountable for those goals by using clear success measures.</li><li>Assign ownership to these goals.</li><li>Anchor departments/teams to the same overall vision.</li></ul>
Pros
- Visualizing the hierarchy and relationship between objectives and key results. The nesting and double alignment functionality are especially helpful, as they can't easily be expressed on, say, a simple worksheet or Confluence page.
- Reminding the team to make regular check-ins. What gets measured gets done. This prevents the common pitfall of setting goals and not revisiting them until the end of a project (when it is too late).
- Integration with external sources for automated check-ins. Why do this manually when it can happen behind the scenes?
Cons
- It would be great to have a direct integration to Sigma.
- Sometimes the UI is a little buggy/weird (e.g. re-ordering and adding objectives is not the easiest).
Likelihood to Recommend
Ally perfectly meets our needs for OKR management. My team uses it to ensure that we are making progress on our quarterly objectives and regularly check in—at minimum, once a week but often more frequently. The only misuses at my company are due to user error, notably when people incorrectly use it for task management rather than measurable goals.
