The new Jira & Leapsome integration: Connect Issues to Goals & OKRs

Connecting strategic company-level or team-level goals with the day-to-day execution can be a tough task. While goal-setting processes like OKR cycles might occur quarterly, teams need to plan their weeks and ensure that their work contributes to the overarching objectives. This is why most companies need both goal management and task management tools running in parallel.

Various functionalities within Leapsome’s Goals and OKRs feature help solve this disconnect.

For instance, you can create Key Initiatives within each Goal. This means that every Goal can have the following components:

• Objective: What you’re trying to accomplish;
• Key Results: What you’re measuring to know if you have achieved the objective;
• Key Initiatives: The main projects (or “pillars”) of work you will undertake to fulfill the key results.

You can think of this model as a tiered system where each layer feeds into the layer above it, with Key Initiatives being the most granular and “operational.”

• And now you can go a level further with Leapsome’s new Jira integration, which allows you to directly link Jira Issues to your Goals & OKRs in Leapsome.

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Jira Issues within Leapsome’s OKR framework

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What is Jira?

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If you’re unfamiliar with Jira, it’s a project management platform most commonly used by software development teams. That said, its usage now transcends the software development world, and many companies use it to track projects across all departments. Within Jira, an “Issue” is an individual piece of work. 

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This means that you can now keep track of the individual “Issues” — or pieces of work — that are being managed (and completed) in pursuit of your Goals within Leapsome.

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Setting up the integration

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The integration is very straightforward to set up. You can link all matching accounts on both platforms in just a few clicks and be up and running. Once active, the integration is entirely bidirectional. This means that you can link to your Leapsome Goals from an Issue within Jira, and you can link to your Jira Issues from a Goal within Leapsome. Please keep in mind that currently, Leapsome only supports cloud-based Jira instances and it does not support on-premise Jira setup.

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The ability to connect the two platforms now allows teams to get a clear overview of whether Issues contribute toward Goals or not. This makes planning and prioritization more objective: if an Issue doesn’t contribute to a Goal, perhaps it shouldn’t be prioritized. Similarly, when reviewing progress toward Key Results, it’s easy to see an overview of the underlying Issues completed in pursuit of the Goal.

This level of interoperability between Leapsome and Jira was an often-requested feature, and we hope that this is another great step in helping organizations create a high-performance culture. Soon, the progress toward your Key Results within Leapsome will be automatically updated when Jira Issues are completed, giving you a real-time view of your progress to date.

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If you’re an existing Leapsome customer and would like to use the Jira integration, simply follow our instructions on how to add the Leapsome application to your Jira workspace.

If you’re interested in learning more about how the Leapsome platform can help your organization drive employee performance, engagement, and development, book a demo with one of our product experts.

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