Top 10 reasons why I believe Viva Goals failed and what to look for in a replacement
In December of 2024, Microsoft announced the retirement of Viva Goals which is set to sunset later this year. Me and the team at Inspire have first-hand experience with the Viva Goals product which is the primary basis of my assessment. We tried Viva Goals for about a year and found it very difficult to implement and achieve our OKRs, even as experienced OKR practitioners. Microsoft explained their decision as primarily due to lack of growth (obviously not selling as fast as their Office 365 products to millions of clients) and I believe there were several key deficiencies beyond that which likely led to its demise. My good friend, Paul Niven who is the president of OKRsTraining.com released another excellent book late last year called OKRs for Dummies which I believe is the best modern day OKRs playbook on the market and includes a chapter on selecting software for OKRs. We used Paul’s checklist to compare Viva Goals to our Inspire Software tool among others and discovered that less than half of Paul’s recommendations is implemented by Viva. You can find it here at this link.
Here are the Top 10 reasons why I believe Viva Goals failed:
1. Coaching, Training and User support!
When we implemented Viva, we were surprised how little support there was in the product for users to not only learn how to navigate the software but also how to capitalize on best practices for implementation. A successful OKR implementation is like achieving black diamond status in skiing. We’re in the middle of an epic ski season here at our headquarters in Jackson Hole, WY and I love to use the skiing analogy to describe mastering OKRs.
The beauty of the sport of skiing is that there are an infinite number of micro-levels to gain expertise within the standard green (novice), blue (intermediate) and black diamond (expert) levels, and the best way to achieve black diamond is to have a coach in the environment that you are skiing in. It’s simply not enough to read a book or listen to an expert in a ski shop and then ride down a black diamond cliff on your own. You need someone to observe your abilities, let you know what you’re doing wrong (and right!) and help guide you on your journey to becoming an expert. Our team of coaches and trainers (internal and partners) have implemented thousands of clients with OKRs in software, have seen many successes & failures and know how to guide you to success. Our approach is to start new users at the novice stage to keep things simple and achieve small wins and then coach them through intermediate to expert to be able to set up a strong corporate strategy, align teams and contributors to successfully execute through the processes and features necessary to win the long game.
2. Corporate Strategy Module.
Your company’s strategic objectives and key results need special treatment beyond the standard contributors’ needs for OKRs. Senior leaders need tools that guide them to create strong strategic OKRs with modern AI capabilities along with ways to communicate, roll-out and execute at all levels of the organization. Our Corporate Strategy module provides a wealth of views, filters, and settings to support the full strategy lifecycle from goal setting, to communication, to rollout, to regular reviews. Viva treated company goals as standard OKRs with a company tag on it yet had very limited reports and views to facilitate strong analysis of progress.
3. Team KR to Strategic KR alignment with meaningful calculations.
In Viva and other OKR tools, the common alignment approach is to align from objective to objective, but best practices for Team OKRs is that they have a variety of key results that help them achieve the primary outcome. Those key results are not usually intended to have the same type of metrics. For example, a sales OKR should have an outcome KR that aligns to the company’s revenue key result yet should also include other KRs that count leading measures such as number of outbound meetings scheduled, demos held, and other results that can influence and predict the success of the outcome. Flexible KR to KR alignment is critical if you want meaningful progress calculated at the top. When you align at the objective level, you can only really calculate overall progress which may not make sense when trying to determine the progress of a specific key result metric in the strategy.
4. Dashboards with supporting data.
In addition to having tools to view and analyze OKR progress, dashboards that bring in external data such as KPIs from the company’s Business Intelligence tool are very important for effective monthly and quarterly business reviews (MBRs/QBRs), quarterly retrospectives and other meetings. Additionally, the use of AI tools can help reduce the many hours of staff work that is typically required to prepare for MBRs and QBRs such as a narrative summary of the progress, wins and setbacks reported as compared to the last review. All these metrics contained in AI-generated presentations can really make a huge difference in keeping senior leaders engaged and accountable for results. Dashboard widgets that take advantage of Microsoft’s Copilot tools such as MS Teams, provide excellent meeting summaries and follow-on action items for easy viewing, and confirm that important action items from the last MBR are tracked and addressed.
5. Useful AI tools throughout the platform.
Beyond assisting in setting up OKRs, AI can assist in many other ways throughout the goal setting and execution lifecycle. AI can, and should be used to help executives brainstorm and set strong strategic OKRs using the best practices of OKR writing; help summarize progress and activities that are ongoing in OKR/KR alignments; generate insights for business reviews; help teams and contributors plan their weekly tasks and activities against their OKRs; facilitate high quality 1-on-1 conversations; help leaders provide feedback and recognition; capture OKR performance through the performance management process, and more, as AI emerging features and capabilities evolve every quarter.
6. Planning module and features.
Most business professionals utilize some form of organizational task management that integrates with Microsoft or Google’s task planning systems such as Outlook, ToDo, Planner or the hundreds of apps that integrate with these. Planning and tasks are critical to OKRs, its where the rubber hits the road for OKR progress, and the ability to plan and organize against your highest OKR priorities is a critical feature. Although Viva allowed Planner task accomplishments to automatically update key results, the ability to plan and manage tasks against OKRs was surprisingly absent.
7. Software Integrations.
Beyond the Microsoft stack, Viva Goals had a very small handful of system integrations that it supported. Data that is being tracked in a system within the organization that can be used to drive progress on key results should be utilized to avoid duplicate entry in the OKR system. There are many other systems that can facilitate the successful execution of OKRs including HR Information Systems, Accounting, Communication, CRM, Payroll, Productivity and Project Management systems that most companies utilize.
8. Team meeting and accountability features.
Most of the best strategy execution processes recommend some form of regular team accountability sessions that encourage team members to conduct meetings to review and discuss scoreboards and data. Such scoreboards show contributor progress at the KR level and allow teams to readily review and discuss which tasks team members have completed, are in-progress and where they need help.
9. One-to-One meeting features.
Conducting 1-1 meetings between a manager and their direct reports is a crucial step in the strategy execution process to provide each contributor the specific coaching they need for direction and support. Often, team members won’t speak up in team meetings to identify where they’re struggling on tasks/goals, so having a good tool to provide insight and conversation starters, helps managers lead quality conversations to assure employees get the help they need to advance and stay engaged.
10. Performance Management Integration.
Part of a successful change management effort to encourage and convince employees to contribute to OKRs is to assure that they are given credit for their contributions and results in their regular performance reviews. There are several conflicting opinions on whether to include OKRs in compensation for fear of “sandbagging” which is a topic for another whole set of blogs (stay tuned), but most experts that I’ve worked with agree that the work on OKRs should be recognized as part of an employees’ performance review. Based on the challenges of “recency bias” by managers who usually only write appraisals from their recent memory of a few months, it seems like a no-brainer to me to be able to capture and utilize the full performance cycle’s data history of progress check-ins, 1-1 conversations and other data assisted by AI to help create a comprehensive and fair review for a contributor. I’ve experienced that AI can also result in better written, appreciative feedback for employees which can boost them towards more optimally motivated OKRs/goal contributions and future ongoing contributions. Powerful results can come from aligned and integrated strategy, performance management and good leadership principles.
Conclusion
If you are currently using Viva Goals, still working with spreadsheets, or just looking for a solution to improve success with your strategy execution with OKRs, please check out Inspire Software and setup a demo with us to take the next steps in your execution journey.
