Microsoft Viva vs. Workboard

Well suited for

• Companies that have experience of using the OKR methodology and have a clear understanding of what it is
• Companies that are planning to expand/scale the OKR program
• Companies that are looking to reduce the effort involved in running the OKR program

Ill-suited for:

• Companies that are using OKRs for the first time and do not have a clear understanding of the methodology

Incentivized

Workboard is well suited in any organization IMO, it allows the individual business units to quickly set, define, organize and track their respective OKR's and align them with the larger business goals. The speed at which we're able to do this with Workboard has allowed us to spend more time on the goals themselves and less time on the management of the goal-setting exercise.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Project management at higher level - includes tasks assignment, visual representations of the project status and deadlines
• Increases the team members' sense of ownership - especially for people that are not used with or exposed to dedicated project management tools like Microsoft Project is.
• User collaboration - which in turn reduces the communication via email
• Increases the efficiency of the meetings - by quickly going through the action items and updating the task progress in the tool itself
• Support has been outstanding so far

Incentivized

• Accelerate integrations and add more integrations.
• Ally.io has room for improvement in providing benchmark in-depth analysis across industries, same-size companies, etc.
• Ally.io can still improve upon some of its product features and communicating the releases. Videos have been extremely helpful.

Incentivized

• There's a bit of a ramp time to using the service.

Incentivized

Again, Ally ranks very high and this is because they continuously work towards improving their software, platform and solutions. I believe that they have been very innovative and are adding important layers to help keep an OKR program culture relevant and beneficial to its customers. Ally is an opinion leader in this category and not a me-too tool.

Incentivized

Workboard vs Microsoft Project(and its Server) is like comparing a regular sport car with Formula 1 cars. One is lighter, nicer, with a broader audience, it gets you there fast while the other one is dedicated, not as nice, especially built for it, not for everyone and it will get you there much faster.

Incentivized

• Ally.io has had a positive impact so far in reducing the effort involved in managing the entire OKR program.
• It also has brought with itself the opportunities to avail training and Q&A sessions with experts
• Increased the overall engagement of the company with its objectives

Incentivized

• Amount of time saved for managing goals had allowed us to spend more time on goal setting and tracking.

Incentivized