Goals in Atlas are a flexible system to communicate how your teams are progressing toward achieving shared outcomes. In Atlas, you can define parent goals, and sub-goals, assign owners for each, and link to contributing projects.

Goal owners will receive an automated reminder to share a monthly update with stakeholders, encouraging visibility and feedback as work progresses.

Just like projects in Atlas, by default, you can assign a simple status to each goal you are tracking–On track, At risk, or Off track. And you can also mark a goal as Pending, Paused or Completed 🎉 .

Available on the paid Standard and Premium plans, the Status and score method allows you to give goals a projected score based on how confident you are that you’ll meet your goal by your target date.

Workspace admins can turn on this method in Workspace settings under Goal scoring method. Changing the goal-scoring method will apply to all goals in your Atlas Workspace.

At Atlassian, we regularly share our reflections on how our goals are progressing. That’s why we’ve built in a monthly reminder for goal owners to share their updates and project whether the goal is OFF TRACK, AT RISK, or ON TRACK for completion by your target date.

When a goal owner posts their monthly update they'll be asked to assign a score based on their current projection:

When using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework for goal-setting, you set an overarching goal, aka the Objective, and define the Key Results that show progress towards that Objective.

In Atlas, you can model OKRs by creating parent goals with any number of sub-goals. You can set the parent goal as the Objective [O], and define the sub-goal as a Key Result [KR].

☝️ A quick note on goal scores

Scores can have different meanings based on the type of objective set. While aspirational objectives have a typical achievement score of 0.7, committed objectives are scored as 1 when achieved. We recommend including a rubric of what scores mean in each goal's About tab, so you and your teams have a shared understanding.

Setting goals and aligning work across teams is no small feat. While Atlas isn’t strictly an OKR tool, we still advocate for consistent communication—a Loop if you will—to ensure everyone can connect the dots across teams, their apps, and their work.

We’ve seen our most successful Atlas customers start by:

To improve cross-team alignment, we recommend starting with an existing behavior: project status communication. While we all have to do it—with varying (usually middling) degrees of success—ensuring teams work well together only happens when we’re communicating frequently and effectively.
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With an agile mindset, incremental improvements compound. Soon enough, quick wins can turn into big ones. Communicating regularly on how projects and goals are progressing is key to driving work forward.

For more information on using Atlas to communicate the context and status of projects, see our recorded demo.