Coda Tutorial for Planning & OKRs

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2. Support your planning process

2.3 Integration

Resolve resource conflicts and other outstanding issues.

When you enter the integration phase, your KRs are written, but some teams are likely overloaded, and some key decisions - like trading off two competing projects - still need to be made.

Coda can help in different ways during this phase. First, we will show you how create a dashboard that allows executives and department leads to see key results across teams and individuals - this can help spot who is overloaded. These are pretty crude ways of detecting overloaded teams as they do not factor in the complexity of the OKRs, but they are a good way to get started visualizing OKRs.

Next, we will show you how to use Coda to help structure the countless discussions and issues that need to be resolved. We will show you a great method we call Company Bullpen. We will also show you how to use the Coda comments feature for asynchronous discussions.

Everything in this section is optional but can greatly improve your planning process.

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⭐ What you’ll get

A dashboard, visualizing your key results.

A meeting space to resolve overloaded teams or individuals.

💼 What you’ll use

Views

Charts

Templates

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1. Create a dashboard page.

Create a key results dashboard page to simplify load balancing.

Add a page and name it 3. Integration.

Under it create a subpage called OKR load.

2. Create chart of KR by individual.

On that new dashboard page we will be analyzing the key results to find people or teams that are overloaded.

Add a new view of the Key results table and name it Key result count by individual.

Type “/table” and select table.

Select Key results from the dropdown.

Rename the table Key result count by individual.

Change the table display mode to chart

On the table header click Options and in the side panel at the top click (...) More → Chart.

Click Chart display.

Set chart type to Bar Chart.

Click on the dropdown below Horizontal axis and select Driver.

Click on the drop down below Values and select Key result.

Make sure the second drop down is set to Count.

This will count the number of key results assigned to each driver.

It is likely you will have a lot of drivers and the vertical bar chart selected by default will not be ideal. Change Orientation to Horizontal.

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3. Chart your key results by team.

Now that you have a KR load for individuals, let’s take a look at the load by team.

Below your Key result count by individual chart, add view of your Teams table and name it Key result count by team.

(If you didn’t enable this earlier) Add a column and make it a linked relation column connected to your Key results table.

Right click on the Key results column header.

Select Add related column → Key result Count

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Make your view a chart.

Click Options on the table header.

Choose the three dot menu in the top right labeled More.

Select Chart

Click Chart display.

Change the Horizontal Axis to Team. (If you set the orientation to horizontal as recommended, this will become the vertical axis).

Change Values to Key result - Count.

Change the Orientation to Horizontal.

Rename your new view to Key result count by team.

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Tip: If you decide to track dependencies across teams (see:

Tracking dependencies⁠

), you can use the same process in steps 2 and 3 to track dependency load by team.

4. Create a bullpen forum for discussing key result bandwidth.

Now that you have created a dashboard to see the breakdown of key result by team and individual, you’ll need a way to resolve overload issues. We suggesting hosting a bullpen style meeting. The tl;dr on a bullpen is:

It’s a place where lots of people can meet and efficiently get through a lot of different small and large topics that each require different groups of people to discuss.

It’s scheduled, so people only need to meet at a given time; avoiding the nightmare of scheduling 50+ meetings with different groups on a single day.

Want to find out more about bullpens and how to schedule them easily with Coda?

Check out this template.⁠

To use this template, go to the template and click the Copy Doc button at the top. This will create a new document for the bullpen meeting.

If you’d rather have the bullpen organized in your OKR doc, simply mark the entire page in the copied doc, copy it, and paste it into a new subpage under the 3. Integration page. We called our page Company Bullpen.

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5. Async discussion regarding an individual KRs.

Some people just won’t be able to make all of their bullpen slots, but you still need their feedback. The simplest way to get this feedback is through comments on the Objectives table. To add comments to to your objectives:

Go back to your Top-down guidance page.

Click into the Guidance column.

Highlight any of the writeup and click the comment icon

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Now you can start a comment thread around any part of the writeup.

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Adding a comment to canvas column in detail display.gif

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Now what?

With key result overload resolved, you’re ready for your teams to present out to the company on their objectives. Head over to

2.4 Final presentation⁠

to build out the presentation section of your doc.

Gallery

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.