Using Viva Goals in an organization with a dedicated ticketing/tasks system could be tricky. Your employees will need to update tasks in one system and do check-ins with Viva Goals. Using the integration feature you can configure the ticketing/tasks system to automatically update Viva Goals. Employees will use their system and you will get data in Goals!
By default, all integrations are disabled, and you must configure them manually. Microsoft prepared 25 built-in connections with 3rd party systems, for example, Asana, Box, GitHub, Jira, SQLs, Salesforce, and Azure DevOps. Each system has its configuration settings and requirements.
I use Jira for everyday tasks and tickets and in this post, I will go through the Jira configuration.
Integration configuration
1. Navigate to the Admin center and go to the Integrations tab
2. Find Jira and click Enable
3. On the next page select New connection to setup integration between Jira and Viva Goals
4. Provide all required information
- A connection name
- URL to your Jira online server
- Email registered in Jira
- Jira API Token
- You can share your connection with all users in Viva Goals
5. To genera a Jira API token, navigate to https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens page and click Create an API token
6. Provide API token name and click Create
7. Copy API token
8. Enter your token and click Next
9. Your connection is ready to use!
Connecting Jira connection to your OKRs
Now you can use the connection in OKRs. This process requires editing your Key results.
1. Edit a Key result and go to the Progress tab and change the update method to Automatically from a data source and select the Jira connection
2. Enter a JQL query and select Track Progress by type
- You must build your query to return tasks from Jira. You create a query for a specific Epic or Entire project. This configuration automatically returns all tasks and monitors their progress.
- There are many metrics that you can use to track progress, for example, Progress, Remaining Estimate, Time Spent, etc. Use the one that fits your needs
Click Next and Viva Goals to connect your Key result with Jira!
Update process
Viva Goals update tasks status every hour. When you create a connection, it will be immediately updated when it’s configured.
1. To test the connection I created 5 tasks and marked 2 as completed.
2. Viva Goals refreshed the data and now I can see the progress in my Dashboard!
Summary
The integration feature is fantastic for medium or big organizations. It’s hard to imagine working with 2 tools – some people won’t check-in in on Viva Goals frequently and progress charts will be outdated.
Integrations with 3rd party systems fill that gap. You can configure specific connectors and Key results and all your Objectives will be automatically updated.
You can find additional information on Docs page – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/goals/integrations-overview
