February 2024 Product Update
The new year is in full swing! By this point, your company has more than likely already completed your strategic offsite, and you are kicking off goals for a record-breaking year.
So now that you’re kicked off, how can you ensure that your plan will be executed in a focused way? How can you track that the most important outcomes will be hit?
We are excited to announce new features that will help your team drive outcomes and collaborate more effectively, helping your company identify bends early on before they become expensive breaks at the end of the year.
Features Included in This Update:
- Introducing Outcomes
- Charts for Advanced Reporting
- Upgraded Microsoft Teams Experience
- Homepage and Ownership Enhancements
- Pinning Comments & Uploading Files
Let's dive in!
Driving Outcomes with Radically Simple Collaboration
Dig Deeper Into Your Strategic Outcomes
Strategic planning is a highly connected and collaborative process. Your entire company needs to know how things are connected to support the most important priorities in a focused manner.
In past innovation issues, we highlighted the launch of Hierarchy View and Upgrades to Tactics, as well as upgrades to Hierarchy View and Advanced Reporting, to promote transparency around how your strategic plan is connected.
These features have helped you draw insights and create connections for Objectives and Tactics, but how do you see connections and potential risks around your KPIs and Key Results? How can you determine when ARR, New Business, or other important metrics are affected by an objective going off track, or a Tactic being blocked?
Introducing Outcomes.
We have made significant upgrades to help you better understand how your Outcomes are connected to your strategic plan, and when they might be at risk.
Outcome Connections & Trends
For each Outcome (formerly called Metrics), you are now able to see where it is connected in Elate. These Outcome connections will help you better understand how Objectives connected to a specific Outcome are trending, including what is off pace or what has worsened.
For customers who have purchased the Tactics Pro module, you can see what Objectives are tied to Tactics with blockers. Being able to identify these blockers allows you to more easily answer the question “Is there anything that is putting my ARR Outcome at risk of being missed?”
Understanding connections and cross-functional impact around your Outcomes in the moment will help your team better understand why an Outcome is at risk, and how you can take action to get it back on track before it is too late.
Finally, you can also simply see who is accountable for an Outcome. Assign a team and owners responsible that will take a role in leading this outcome to be successful.
New Outcomes Library
Another new feature that will allow you to dig deeper into your Outcomes is the Outcomes Library.
From the Plan Execution page, you can see all Outcomes tied to your organization, search for a specific Outcome with ease, filter by Team Responsible or Outcome Owner, and quickly answer specific questions about your Outcomes.
Charts for Advanced Reporting
We have been hearing incredible stories about how Strategy & Ops Leaders are streamlining reporting workflows, and proactively uncovering opportunities. Whether it's facilitating better conversations in Executive Team meetings, simplifying Board Meeting preparation, or sharing an End-of-Quarter department report, Advanced Reporting is fostering consistency in reporting.
The positive feedback we've received after launching the ability to Link Saved Views to Advanced Reports has been overwhelming. So, we’ve decided to take it a step further by introducing charts for Advanced Reporting.
These charts allow you to summarize Objective Progress and Performance for saved views in Elate, creating an easily understandable view that updates as objectives are updated.
Stop spending countless hours compiling charts that grow stale in PowerPoint. Create dynamic, skimmable charts just once, and they’ll stay up-to-date based on what’s in Elate.
Radically Simple Collaboration
Upgraded Microsoft Teams Experience
Connecting Elate and Microsoft Teams simplifies how you and your entire team can update objectives in Elate. We have made many significant upgrades to our connection with Microsoft Teams to meet your employees where they already work.
Elate and Microsoft Teams seamlessly integrate – whether it's editing an Objective's status in Teams, receiving a report in advance of a meeting, or closing an Objective at the end of a quarter, the connection with Teams allows your employees to be connected and engaged with the company's strategy without ever logging in to Elate.
Rest assured, the experience for your employees in Microsoft Teams will be simple, increasing the likelihood that everyone updates their objectives. To install the upgrades to Microsoft Teams for your organization, go to Elate’s Microsoft AppSource listing.
Home Page & Ownership Upgrades
Updating your Objectives, Tactics, and Outcomes should be radically simple. We make it incredibly easy to make updates from Slack or Microsoft Teams, but we also want to make it as streamlined as possible from the Elate platform.
That’s exactly why we revamped the Home Page, to bring the relevant information to each individual user in one streamlined view.
The upgraded Home Page allows your team to update their Objectives, Tactics, Outcomes, and To Do items all from one personalized dashboard, creating complete transparency to your team of what they are accountable for and how they contribute to the larger plan.
Pinning Comments and Uploading Files
Finally, we have added more capabilities to help your team better collaborate on their Objectives. We heard your feedback that there is often key information in a file that is important to the success of an Objective.
To ensure this information is captured, we have launched the ability to upload files to an objective. You can upload popular file formats, like a PDF, Word document, CSV, Excel Workbook, or images (PNG or JPG, for example).
Further, team members are collaborating more than ever, and it's crucial to ensure that vital comments aren't lost in the shuffle.
With "Pinned Comments," your team can now prioritize and prominently display the most pressing information at the top for all members to access when they need it most.
Request a Demo
Your Strategy is set, and now comes the fun part: executing.
If you'd like to see a customized demo of Elate or connect with a strategy expert, get in touch with us below