I am trying to develop a management tool for rolling up key objectives to the company level while at the same time allow teams to manage their individual projects. I know at a high-level Coda should be good for this but I want to get some advice on how to lay out the proper hierarchies so I can get us off to the right start. Here is how we roughly manage our business.
We have several types of “Project” such as:
Business Key Objectives - These are 3 to 5 areas to build improvements to our business. The things we must get right to grow and succeed (not day to day work). We use our own type of RACI model to create the team members from people throughout the business.
Client Project Key Objectives - We have about 5 client project. For each of them we identify e 3 to 5 key objectives that each client project key objectives must achieve. These are “high-level” objectives and
For both of these Key Objective types above, they are high level and come with Mission statements on the pain points, objectives, guidelines, team members, key milestones with dates, etc. It is worth noting that the objectives are generally outside of everyone’s day-to-day roles and work so we are not tracking day to day objectives but unique things that could be one-time fixes, yearly goals related to a specific project, long term processes to deploy across the business or just a simple “hit team” for answering a strategic question.
So far - it should be pretty straight forward in Coda. The challenge is here. For a more complicated objective it will have sub-projects that need real tracking and monitoring, For example, “build a new marketing process” will have a number of independent project sub efforts that roll-up into the specific “client A project key objectives - marketing”. This could be operations team building systems to support the marketing team, another team building the marketing internal processes, and another team working on the content calendar, etc. So in otherwords the Company Obj=>Project 1 Objective “Build and launch new marketing effort for X client” =>Sub-Project 1 - Find and integrate new inbound marketing platform, Sub-Project 2 - Building Marketing Calendar with Client, etc.
So sometimes we need project teams and tracking at the objective level and sometimes at the sub-project level.
From a management perspective, every Objective has key milestone dates with metric we are using - some numerical, many not. So on a monthly all teams meetings we are doing a quick run through of all the company and client project key objectives. In other words we ask what is current status, where are we at versus what was projected at the end of last month, what are we projecting for the next months, what help or blockers are they facing. That’s is all we discuss. However at the sub-project level, team have many more dates, milestones, actions lists, etc that they are using to manage their tasks. I only need to look into the details when something is not on target or their is a key task that hasn’t been considered.
I am not sure how clear this is but I am not sure if every possible Key objective, Client project objective and Sub Project objectives all go on the same level and the create a view to filter it. Or should I nest various activities? Any thoughts or advice would greatly be appreciated. I am especially trying to understand the tradeoffs of what I lose through different approaches.
Should I consider managing the milestones using an OKR like independent project where I set up and track it with the team leaders and this is independent from sub-projects and project tracking or is there a way to set the key milestones withing the project/sub project itself and then have them feed up into the reporting?
Thanks
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