Strategic Themes: Connect Strategy, OKRs and Delivery

Strategy usually does not fail because organisations cannot define goals. It fails when those goals become disconnected from the work that is meant to deliver them. Objectives sit in one place, delivery work lives in Jira or Azure DevOps, and progress has to be reconstructed for every review.

Strategic Themes bring those pieces together.

Are we making progress on what we said matters, and which work is actually driving that progress?

A Strategic Theme gives you one place to organise objectives and key results, assign ownership, connect delivery work and see progress roll up from execution to strategy. Key results can be measured by a target value, by linked delivery items, or by other objectives. Progress then rolls up automatically through key results, objectives, objective groups and the theme.

The same theme gives leadership and delivery teams different ways to work with the same strategy: List View for day-to-day management, Dashboard and Progress Tracking for reviews, Roadmap and Timeline for planning, Updates for context, and Snapshots for comparing what changed over time.

With Strategic Themes you can:

Select OKRs in the left navigation to open Themes & Portfolios, the main workspace for Strategic Themes and portfolios.

You can also reach themes from:

Strategic Themes are part of the Objectives Planning & Tracking package. If OKRs is missing from your navigation, the package is not active for your company.

The Themes & Portfolios page is the starting point for finding, creating and organising strategy. From here you can open an existing theme, create a new one, or group themes into portfolios.

Each tab shows its count.

Select Settings to choose and order the columns under Columns for Strategic Themes. Title is always shown.

Select a heading to sort. Rows can also be dragged into the order you want. That order is shared.

Each theme row has a menu:

Select New Theme on the Themes & Portfolios page, or Edit Theme on a theme page or row menu. The form is titled Create Strategic Theme or Edit Strategic Theme and has two tabs.

Basic Information

Associations

Layout Configuration

Settings

Appearance

Choose who can see the theme and what they can do. Add users or groups under Groups / Users, pick one or more roles under Select Roles, and select Add. A theme needs at least one user or group.

The theme is visible only to company administrators and to the users and groups you add here, or who have a role on a portfolio containing the theme. See Permissions.

Select Save. Kendis checks for a title, a short summary and at least one user or group, and confirms with Theme saved successfully.

A new theme receives the next key, such as CV-13, and opens with no objective groups yet. Closing the form without saving discards your changes without asking.

Open a theme to move from the high-level strategic statement into the objectives, key results, delivery links and progress behind it.

The header card uses the theme's colour and pattern and shows:

When you scroll, a compact header keeps the title, counts and progress in view.

The Time Period control at the top right filters the whole page.

The header counts, the Dashboard and the progress figures all follow the filter. Groups whose objectives all fall outside the period drop out of the roll-up. Your choice is remembered per theme in your browser.

Reset filters clears the period filter and any other active filter.

Updates opens the Recent Updates panel for the theme. See Updates.

Settings on the theme page configures columns:

The Summary tab gives you the executive context for the theme before you move into the detailed OKRs. The Details card shows the theme's Summary, Description, Portfolio, Owners and Status. Select the pencil on a row to edit it in place and Save.

Owners is a list of people. The first owner is also recorded as the theme's Responsible.

When Charlie AI is enabled, the Summary tab can also turn the current theme data into two leadership-ready views:

Each result can be exported as PDF, copied, regenerated or asked a follow-up question. Generated summaries are saved automatically to Summary History, where you can compare two or more.

Generating a summary uses your company's AI tokens.

Objective groups give a theme its organisational structure. They let you separate objectives by ART, department, collection or another ownership boundary while still rolling everything into the same strategic theme. Groups are created and managed in the List View.

A theme with no groups shows Getting Started with Strategic Themes with both options: Add Objectives for Collections and Custom Objective Group.

Each group header shows:

Select the group title to open the group's details, with Overview, Comments, History and Watchers. A group has a title, description, status, responsible person and colour.

By default every objective counts equally towards its group. Assign Weights to Objectives lets you set 0.5x, 1x, 2x or 3x per objective and shows the resulting share of the group's progress. See How progress is calculated.

Delete Objective Group asks You want to delete objective group? Deleting a group also deletes the objectives in it and their key results. The delivery items linked to them are not affected. If the group was the theme's only connection to its collection, that collection leaves the theme's associations.

The default group of a board context cannot be deleted.

Import Objectives opens a wizard that accepts pasted rows or an uploaded file. Choose Objectives Only, Objectives + Key Results or Groups + Objectives + KRs, map the columns, and import. Parents are matched by title, statuses by name and responsible people by email. Up to 500 rows per import.

In the List View, select + in a group header, or Create Objective on an existing objective to create a child objective.

Kendis confirms with Objective Created. A new objective is Committed, takes the first To Do status, and measures linked items By Rollup (Status).

A time period is required: Please select a time period for objective. appears otherwise.

When Charlie AI is enabled, Create Objective Using Charlie® AI drafts objectives for you.

An objective's Overview shows the fields of the theme's Objective Layout. The standard ones are:

Fields save as you leave them. Kendis confirms with Changes saved.

Select the key or title to open the objective. The panel shows the progress percentage and the tabs Overview, Linked Items, Key Results, Updates, Comments, Associations, History, Watchers and Progress Flow.

From the row menu choose Delete Objective. Kendis warns This action will delete {key} from all of the groups. Deleting an objective also deletes its key results and child objectives. Linked delivery items are untouched.

A key result only becomes useful when its progress has a clear source. In Kendis, every key result has a Progress Criteria that defines where its percentage comes from:

In the List View, hover an objective and select Create Key Result.

Kendis confirms with Key Result Created. The objective must already have a time period. Otherwise Kendis says Add a time period to this objective to start using Key Results.

You can also select Add Key Result on the objective's Key Results tab. That form asks for a title, status, time period, start date, end date and progress criteria, and confirms with Key Result created successfully.

A target key result's row shows Start, Target, Unit and Progress with a pencil beside each. Edit the value and press Enter. Kendis confirms with Key Result Updated.

Progress is the current value. Kendis works out the percentage from Start, Progress and Target, so a key result that must go down, such as Reduce incidents from 40 to 10, works as naturally as one that must go up.

Updating the number is the measurement. Write the story behind it in Updates.

Status, responsible, teams, time period, business value and custom fields edit the same way as on an objective. A key result opens into Overview, Updates, Comments and History.

To delete a key result choose Delete Key Result from its row menu, or Remove Key Result on the objective's Key Results tab. A key result belongs to one objective, so removing it deletes it.

Linking delivery work is where Strategic Themes connect strategy to execution. An objective, or a key result measured By Items, can derive its progress directly from the Jira, Azure DevOps or Kendis items that contribute to it.

Hover a row in the List View and select Link Item, or open the item and select Add Items on its Linked Items tab.

In Link Items:

Kendis confirms with Items Linked Successfully. Items already linked show a Linked pill. Untick one and save to unlink it. Kendis names the items it is about to unlink and asks first.

The tab lists every linked item with a progress bar for the whole set.

Select a key to open the item in its tool.

Objectives do not have to stop at one theme or one planning level. They can feed other objectives and key results, which lets higher-level goals roll up progress from objectives owned elsewhere.

Linked objectives appear beneath the parent in the List View with their period, progress and status. Kendis prevents loops: an objective that would end up feeding itself is skipped with not linked because of looping.

Linking objectives is available for theme-level objectives.

The Associations tab on an objective shows everything it is connected to: Program Boards Linked, Themes Linked with the groups under each, and OKRs Linked. Create Association adds a connection to a theme, a collection's OKRs, a batch's OKRs or a program board's objectives. Removing a theme association removes the objective from that theme's groups, and Kendis says so before it does.

Progress rolls upward from the evidence beneath each goal. By default, each contributing item is weighted equally unless you explicitly change objective weights at the group level.

A set of linked items becomes a percentage according to Progress by:

An item counts as done when its status is in the Done category. Items in a miscellaneous category are left out.

The average of its key results, its linked objectives and its own linked items, where the linked items together count as one more member. An objective with no key results and no linked items is at 0%.

A group is the weighted average of its objectives, using the weights set in Assign Weights to Objectives. A theme is the plain average of its groups.

Percentages are shown to two decimal places.

Statuses come from your company's workflows, managed in Administration › Workflows. Each status has a category, and the category is what Kendis uses for logic: Done means complete.

Default workflows:

New items take the first To Do status.

Health is calculated automatically rather than selected manually. It compares actual progress with how much of the item's available time has elapsed:

Hover a health badge for the figures behind it: Time Elapsed, Expected, Actual Progress and Variance.

The Dashboard lets you view charts by Health or by Manual Status.

Every objective and key result belongs to a time period and can optionally span a range using End Time Period.

Time periods are calendar periods: Q1 is January to March. The OKR Roadmap and OKR Timeline axes label their quarters and years according to your company's fiscal calendar, but the periods you assign to items are calendar periods.

When you filter by period, Kendis includes every item whose own span overlaps the selected range.

The List View is the working surface for writing, organising and maintaining the theme's objectives and key results.

The banner repeats the theme's identity and adds Back to All Themes, the counts and progress, Status, DURATION, and the buttons Export, Settings and Edit Theme. The same view tabs as the theme page run beneath it, with Updates at the right.

Two sections filter objectives and key results separately.

Filters are applied on the server, so the header counts, progress figures and export all follow them.

Each group is a block: the group header, then an Objectives heading with the add and Link Objective controls, then the rows.

The columns are those chosen under Columns for Listing: Time Period, Associations, Teams, Responsible, Progress (%), Status, BV Plan and BV Actual, plus custom fields.

Export offers Export CSV and Export Excel. In Export Objectives choose:

The export respects the active filters.

The Dashboard turns the current theme into a review view for leadership and teams. It follows the active time-period filter, so the numbers always reflect the scope you are reviewing. Select any tile, bar or segment to open the items behind it, then search, filter or Export to Excel.

Progress Tracking answers a different question from the Dashboard: not just where are we now?, but how have we moved over time? It rebuilds progress history from the changes recorded on the theme's items.

If nothing has changed in the chosen range, Kendis says Progress tracking data not available for this theme.

A group's Progress icon and an objective's Progress Flow tab show the same history for that one group or objective.

The OKR Roadmap and OKR Timeline put the same objectives and key results onto a time axis. Use the Roadmap when you want to plan and adjust dates visually; use the Timeline when you want to inspect the hierarchy together with linked delivery work. Both open from the theme page and share one screen with a Roadmap / Timeline switch.

Numbers show movement; Updates explain why it happened. Use Updates for the short narrative behind the OKRs: what changed, what was decided, what is blocked and what happens next. Field-level changes continue to live in History.

On the theme panel select Add update, write under New update and Save update. On an item, write in the composer, which supports bold, italic, code, lists and links, choose who it is For among the item's participants, and Save update. Ctrl+Enter or Cmd+Enter also saves.

The title is taken from the first sentence.

You can edit or delete your own posts. Users who can edit the item can edit or delete any post on it.

An item's Participants tab lists who is involved. Add people to include teammates. Anyone who can view the item can manage its participants.

Objectives, key results and groups each have:

Objectives and key results do not carry file attachments.

The Snapshots tab lets you freeze the theme at a meaningful checkpoint, such as commitment, mid-quarter or close, and compare that baseline with the live theme later. Theme snapshots support detailed comparison and a Quarterly Business Review; portfolios have snapshot views as well.

Snapshots are covered in full in the OKR Snapshots guide.

A portfolio gives you the next level above an individual theme. Use it to group themes that belong together, such as the strategic priorities of a business unit, and review their ownership, health and progress as one set.

Select + Create Portfolio on the Themes & Portfolios page or on the Portfolios tab.

Basic Details

Users & Permissions works as for a theme. The creator is added as an administrator of the portfolio. Kendis confirms with Portfolio created successfully.

On the Portfolios tab each card shows the theme count, the average progress, the number of active themes and the date range. View Details opens the portfolio. Users who can edit see Edit and Delete icons.

The header shows the portfolio's status, title, summary and the counts of Themes, Objectives, Key Results, Progress and DURATION, with Edit for users who can edit.

The Themes List can be filtered by time period range, by L1 Themes and L1 Collections, and by second-level themes and collections. Reset filters clears them.

A portfolio's Progress is the average progress of the themes it contains.

A role on a portfolio counts as a role on every theme in it. A role on a theme does not grant anything on the portfolio.

Delete asks Delete Portfolio? and warns that this cannot be undone. The portfolio is removed. Its themes remain and simply lose the portfolio link.

Administration › Strategic Themes manages:

Titles are up to 45 characters.

Administration › Workflows holds the status workflows for Objectives, Key Results, Objective Groups, Strategic Themes and Portfolios. Edit the statuses, their categories and colours there. See Statuses and health.

Custom fields for objectives and key results are defined in field layouts. Each theme picks an Objective Layout and a KR Layout when it is created or edited, so different themes can show different fields.

Kendis provides a read-only REST API for Strategic Themes, covering portfolios, themes, objective groups, objectives, key results, linked items and progress, with paging and API key authentication. The OKR API package includes a getting-started guide, a Power BI guide with ready-made queries, a sample export workbook and Python examples. Ask your Kendis contact for the package.

Visibility and editing come from roles granted on the theme or on a portfolio that contains it. Company administrators have full access everywhere.

Roles are defined in Administration. A role lists what it restricts, so a role with no restrictions grants everything. The default roles are Admin, User and Read-Only.

Guest users can view what their roles allow but cannot create, edit or delete anything in Strategic Themes.

A simple operating rhythm is usually more valuable than an elaborate OKR process. For most organisations, this is a good starting point:

Jira and Azure DevOps continue to manage the delivery work. Strategic Themes keep that work connected to the outcomes it is meant to achieve.