Understand organizations and teams in Viva Goals

Organizations and teams can mean different things to different enterprises. Let's discuss a few ways, with examples, of how organizations and teams can be set up flexibly in Viva Goals to help you identify the best structure for your organization.

Organizations in Viva Goals

An organization in Viva Goals resembles the topmost entity in an enterprise at which the organizational OKRs are set up. Every team in that org aligns their OKRs with those organizational OKRs.

Typically, an organization in Viva Goals represents the company or business unit or a large department within the company.

You can create more than one organization in your Viva Goals account.

One organization for one enterprise

Creating a single organization for an enterprise is the recommended approach, unless your enterprise’s needs are different. You can structure this organization to represent the structure of your enterprise.

You can have as many teams and subteams as you wish under an org. That is, you can have teams such as Product & Engineering and subteams such as R&D (research and development), QA (quality assurance), UX (user experience), Biz Ops, etc.

When you have a single organization for your enterprise, it promotes transparency and alignment; everyone is aware of everyone else's work and the progress being made.

Multiple organizations for one enterprise

A single enterprise can have multiple organizations under it in Viva Goals. The following are some scenarios where enterprises may opt for this structure:

• The enterprise has different departments/divisions working in silos and wants only select members (such as leadership teams) to see their progress.

• Different divisions follow different cadences for planning and execution.

• There are some privacy constraints among the divisions within the enterprise.

In cases like these, each division will be an organization. A user who is part of multiple organizations will be able to switch between the organizations to view and contribute to OKR progress in different orgs.

Let's consider the following example: Contoso Suites is a company that offers various products such as VanArsdel and Relecloud—their collaboration suite and cloud suite, respectively. Both these product divisions are independent of each other and work in silos. So, Contoso creates two organizations in Viva Goals—VanArsdel and Relecloud—to represent each of the enterprise's product divisions.

Under each organization, multiple teams and subteams can be created to match the structure of the enterprise and its divisions. These organizations can then have their own org-level, team-level, and individual OKRs.

The drawback of pivoting an org at the division level is that you're contained within a small space where other orgs can't view/contribute to your progress (and vice versa). This may result in a lack of alignment and transparency, which are key to the success of an OKR program.

Teams in Viva Goals

A team in Viva Goals is a group of users working toward a common set of team OKRs. Team OKRs align to organization OKRs, either directly or indirectly.

You can create as many teams and subteams as you want within each of your organizations in Viva Goals.

Hierarchical teams

In the hierarchical type, an organization is broken down into teams, which are further divided into subteams.

For example, Relecloud is broken into Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Marketing. Sales can be broken into Large Enterprise, Mid-market, and SMB (small and medium businesses), and Product & Engineering can be divided into UX, QA, R&D, and so on.

Virtual teams

Virtual teams are cross-functional teams that can have members from multiple departments. They don't necessarily have a hierarchical structure; instead, they generally follow a flat structure.

For example, Relecloud can create a team called Customer experience with members from both the product team and the customer success team.

Structuring your organizations and teams in Viva Goals

The structure of each organization varies in real time. Viva Goals is flexible and enables you to decide the structure of each of your organizations so that they resemble the structure you follow within your enterprise.

For example, VanArsdel may consist of only two levels of OKRs: org-level and team-level. In contrast, Relecloud may allow org-level, team-level, and individual OKRs. Similarly, the team structure in VanArsdel may be hierarchical, while Relecloud may have a flat structure.

Limitations of organizations and teams in Viva Goals

It's crucial to have a clear understanding of how you wish to structure your organization(s) and team(s) in Viva Goals: once set up, the structure can't be reversed, and changing the managers involved in the Viva Goals product and your organization might be a pain. At present, org migration and org merging aren't supported in Viva Goals.

As an example let's assume you choose to follow the single organization approach and populate your OKRs in your Viva Goals account. If you decide to switch to the multiple orgs approach at a later point, you'll need to make a lot of changes on the product front: replanning your OKRs in Viva Goals, reassigning them, realigning them, and so on. You'll also need to go through the pain of communicating these changes to all the individuals across your enterprise.

Another reason to carefully choose where to pivot and create orgs in Viva Goals is that you can't view other organizations' OKRs unless you're added as a member.