WorkBoard's Native Integration with Microsoft Azure DevOps Strengthens OKR Offering for Enterprise Product Teams

REDWOOD CITY, California, March 4, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- WorkBoard, the Enterprise Strategy and Results Management market leader, today announced native integration with Microsoft Azure DevOps for its Enterprise Results Platform, further deepening its interoperability across the Microsoft suite of products.

Already integrated with Microsoft Office favorites' Teams and Outlook, this new integration now empowers developers using Azure DevOps to take advantage of WorkBoard's leading Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) software within the software development and issue tracking solution.

As development teams manage their work in Azure DevOps, they can use WorkBoard's OKRs to quantify how they contribute to the organization's strategic priorities, clarify the "why" in their work and quantify its impact. WorkBoard gives everyone visibility into how development efforts align with company strategy and the progress toward measurable business outcomes. 

"Products are the core of any company's value to customers so it's crucial to align development and innovation efforts with the organization's strategic priorities. Of course, product teams are hungry to make a real impact on customers and their company as well -- so aligning and bringing objectives and key results into line of sight day to day is a real win for them as well as customers and the company," said Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard. "This new integration with Azure DevOps brings OKRs and a structured way of really measuring the near-term business value of work into developers' experience as they manage that work in Azure DevOps." 

While the sprints and tasks in Azure DevOps help track what work needs to be done and team output, OKRs in WorkBoard measures and manages teams' business outcomes that work should drive. WorkBoard provides a common, transparent structure to align, define and measure results within product teams and across the array of teams in the customer value chain.  

With the new integration, WorkBoard provides a native user experience of OKRs inside the Azure DevOps product and allows users to identify work being tracked in Azure DevOps to update progress toward a key result automatically. Product team users can now:

• Display OKRs defined in WorkBoard as a tab in the Azure DevOps experience.
• See, navigate and comment on OKRs within Azure DevOps.
• Quickly update progress toward key results from within Azure DevOps.
• Automatically update key result progress in WorkBoard as work is completed in Azure DevOps.
• Give the rest of the organization transparency on the objectives and key results every product team is driving.

The Azure DevOps integration builds on WorkBoard's close relationship with Microsoft:

• Microsoft uses WorkBoard's Enterprise Results Platform for OKRs.
• WorkBoard's Enterprise Results Platform is also integrated with Microsoft Office apps, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Teams, as well as GitHub.
• WorkBoard's deep integration with Teams is popular with both companies' enterprise customers and allows management of OKRs through conversations and brings WorkBoard views into Teams.M12, Microsoft's venture capital arm, is an investor in WorkBoard and participated in its last three rounds of funding.

WorkBoard is used by large enterprises and fast-growth companies to communicate, align, measure and achieve strategic priorities faster. While it's typically used across the entire enterprise, the capabilities development teams use most enable:

• Development teams to set clear and impactful objectives and key results, including OKRs for the products, pods and squads that better match how technology teams really work. OKR alignment and mirroring key results across teams to continuously surface dependencies and see how work contributes to the overall company growth and customer objectives.
• Automation of tedious operating and product review preparation, giving everyone continuous transparency on the progress to strategic priorities without the heavy reporting burden.
• Smarter and more productive group meetings and huddles with objectives and key results on the agenda and tracking of decisions meeting to meeting.

About WorkBoard:
WorkBoard enables large enterprises to thrive and respond in fast-changing markets by providing an Enterprise Results Platform that helps them align, measure, and drive strategic priorities rapidly. Comcast, Cisco, Cision, Microsoft, Samsung, Workday, Zuora, and others use  WorkBoard's OKR software and expertise to amplify and accelerate business results. WorkBoard also pioneered OKR coaching to help companies collapse time to success with the OKR methodology and has certified 1500 coaches using its proven playbook. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, GGV Capital, Workday, and Microsoft's M12, and based in Redwood City, CA, WorkBoard is the enterprise standard for results. For more information, visit www.workboard.com or follow the company on Twitter @WorkboardInc.

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