December 2023 Product Update

With the new year approaching soon, it is an exciting, yet overwhelming time, for most Strategy and Operations Leaders.

With 2024 knocking on the door, how do you unlock the full potential of your strategy in the new year? How do you make sure the entire company is aligned and executing on the company strategy?

Execution is now more important than ever, and winning companies are focusing their effort on building a strategic plan with clear discernment of priorities and supporting dependencies.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of several timely features aimed at helping you build a resilient, outcome-driven strategy with ease. These features will help your team execute, and will create a shared understanding of how the plan is going (and what is blocked), by automating much of the manual work needed to keep your team informed.

In this update:

• Hierarchy View Upgrades: Tactics & Presentation Mode
• Advanced Reporting: Link Saved Views, Send to Slack & Teams, Mobile Improvements
• New Smartsheet Integration

Building and Executing a Highly Connected Strategic Plan in 2024

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Hierarchy View Upgrades

In the last innovation issue, we announced the launch of Hierarchy View - a way to visualize and build a connected, focused plan. This view allows Strategy & Ops leaders to quickly see how well their Themes are supported, and identify the balance of your strategic plan by seeing a count of how many Objectives support each Theme.

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View Tactics in Hierarchy View

We decided to take Hierarchy View one step further, and with our latest release, you can now see Tactics (learn more about Tactics here) within in the Hierarchy View!

Why does this matter? Seeing Tactics in Hierarchy View unlocks several huge upgrades around your Strategic Planning and Execution:

• Better Connect your Strategy with Execution: By seeing Tactics in Hierarchy View, your whole team can now visualize how a Tactic supports an Objective, and see how those Tactics are progressing.
• Identify Bends Earlier: In Hierarchy View, you can now see when Tactics are blocked. This means you can easily see what Objectives might be "At Risk," allowing you to take action and escalate topics in meetings quicker. This makes it easier understand and have conversation around how a blocker could affect a Key Objective like New Business or Customer Retention, or if a Product Launch is falling behind.

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New Presentation Mode in Hierarchy View

Additionally, Hierarchy View now has Presentation Mode!

If you want to pull up your strategic plan at an offsite, an all hands meeting, or a leadership team meeting (to name a few), Presentation Mode is as simple as the click of a button. Stop making endless presentations around your strategic plan. Run meetings and build your plan directly from Hierarchy View in a way that showcases how your strategy is connected and cross-functional.

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Creating Transparency and an Operating Rhythm to Drive Progress

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Advanced Reporting Upgrades

Reporting on your company’s strategic plan is painful and time consuming. But it doesn’t have to be.

We’ve listened closely to your feedback around how you already leverage Advanced Reporting, and this release includes many of your most requested features.

We categorized your feedback around how you use Advanced Reporting to improve strategic execution into two main categories: automating building reports, and automating sharing reports.

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Now Link Saved Views in Advanced Reporting

The biggest way Advanced Reporting helps save time is by automating what was previously an extremely manual, time consuming process. What previously required dozens of hours taking screenshots, digging into spreadsheets, and making PowerPoint slides, can now take minutes.

To make this process even easier, we're elated to announce the ability to now link saved views in Advanced Reporting!

Now, you might be asking, “Why does that matter?” We're so glad you asked...

This matters because you can build a report once that automatically tracks the progress on your strategic plan, without manual intervention, quarter after quarter.

For example, you can now set up automated reports that shows:

• All Leadership team Objectives that are "At Risk" or "Behind."
• All company Objectives tagged as "board objectives."
• All Objectives that are blocked...

And so much more. This enhancement changes the way transparency is created at your organization. It allows you to automatically identify bends every week, before they become expensive breaks at the end of a quarter.

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Additionally, you can edit what information shows for Objectives on your report, giving you complete control of what information you want to show around your Objectives.

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Send Advanced Reports via Slack and Microsoft Teams

The other category of feedback we heard around Advanced Reporting was the need for easy sharing. Once you’ve set up these automated reports, it is critical to communicate updates with the executive team, department leads, and many other key stakeholders involved in executing on the strategy.

That is why we have launched a feature that automatically sends your recurring reports to Slack and Microsoft Teams!

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We previously only sent these reports to email, which accomplished part of this goal. We have now expanded this feature to further meet your team in the tools they already use, to help keep strategy execution top of mind.

Additionally, Share links for reports are now more mobile friendly. Your team is busy and constantly on the go, and we want to make sure they are able to access the key information they need, when they need it.

These upgrades create a new benchmark for how strategic reporting is done, and how companies can prevent countless wasted hours making presentations. These updates create a baseline for your entire organization to report on, and consume, information around your Strategic Plan in a consistent, automated way.

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Automating the Tracking & Updating of Goals in One Place

So you’ve built your plan, you’ve automated Advanced Reports to be sent to the Leadership team and department leads, and the whole team is aligned on what they are working on. Can it get any better than that? It can. 

With the countless integrations in Elate, double-entry is a thing of the past. Connect Elate to Slack and Microsoft Teams to unlock updates to be automatically pushed to your team where they already work.

Our data integrations allow you to connect your Strategic Plan to tools that every team uses. Pull in New Business from Salesforce or HubSpot, bring in project progress from Monday.com, pull in metrics from spreadsheets your team already tracks in tools like Excel or Google Sheets. 

Introducing All-New Smartsheet Integration

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We recently launched a new Smartsheet integration, adding another tool to better connect your Strategic Plan to tools you already use and love!

To see the full list tools you can connect to Elate, check out our integrations page.

Request a Demo

Planning Season is here. If you'd like to see a customized demo of Elate or connect with a strategy expert, get in touch with us below.