CAI leverages its expansive global workforce of over 800 employee-owners to assist clients in designing, implementing, managing, and sustaining top-tier manufacturing facilities. The company's comprehensive engineering, technical, and consulting services seamlessly integrate people, processes, equipment, systems, and facilities, ensuring optimal performance across global manufacturing operations. CAI caters to diverse client needs in specialized sectors such as Commissioning and Qualification, Quality Assurance and Regulatory Compliance, Human Performance, and Automation and Information Technology. Each business area encompasses distinct service requirements, necessitating unique quality systems, skilled personnel, tailored client bases, and specialized market expertise.
As CAI expanded its services and delivery capabilities, the company recognized the necessity of adopting a modern approach to goal setting and management. To enhance alignment and strategic focus across its geographically dispersed workforce and effectively meet customer demands while remaining committed to its overarching business strategy, CAI embraced the objective and key results (OKR) framework. OKR involves setting ambitious objectives and measurable key results to monitor progress and align teams toward shared goals. Richard Tree, Chief Operating Officer at CAI, explains, “We adopted the OKR framework to increase our agility in planning and responding to market dynamics.”
To maintain agility and responsiveness in serving customers, CAI sought a solution to facilitate the adoption and management of OKRs, enhancing the proficiency of goal setting and business planning across its global remote teams. Tree further elaborates, “I proposed Microsoft Viva Goals to streamline our manual, spreadsheet-based business planning processes. We prioritize investing in technology solutions that promote alignment and minimize redundant efforts.”
I recommended Microsoft Viva Goals as a solution to our overly manual, spreadsheet-driven business planning processes because we typically invest in technology solutions that help us stay aligned and minimize repeated work.
Richard Tree: Chief Operating Officer
CAI
Viva Goals, a component of Microsoft Viva, is an integral part of CAI's employee experience platform aimed at boosting productivity, fostering collaboration, and promoting employee well-being within the digital workplace. This robust goal management tool offers CAI a centralized solution for setting, monitoring, and overseeing OKRs company-wide. Employees align their objectives with CAI’s strategic direction, track progress in real time, and gain insights into how their contributions drive organizational success. Real-time updates enable CAI’s management to promptly address areas needing attention and allocate resources accordingly. Automated goal management workflows seamlessly integrate with CAI’s existing Microsoft 365 apps and services, ensuring simplicity and eliminating the need for complex coding.
Integrated with Microsoft Teams and Power BI, Viva Goals enhances accessibility and usability by allowing employees to manage OKRs through familiar interfaces. This integration streamlines workflows and enhances collaborative efforts driven by data insights. By leveraging CAI’s existing Microsoft ecosystem, Viva Goals minimizes the learning curve associated with adopting new systems, empowering employees to effectively communicate and manage OKRs within their daily work environment.

Setting goals in a dynamic operating environment
CAI prioritizes agility and adaptability while maintaining high service standards. Leveraging OKRs and Viva Goals equips the company with effective tools and methodologies to thrive in competitive, rapidly changing markets. OKRs enable CAI to define clear objectives and measurable outcomes that align closely with its mission and strategic goals, essential for navigating industry complexities shaped by regulatory shifts, technological advancements, and market dynamics impacting project requirements.
Viva Goals enhances CAI’s agility by offering a user-friendly, integrated platform. This empowers employees to efficiently manage and monitor their OKRs, facilitating connectivity, informed decision-making, and responsive actions in dynamic environments. CAI's strategic focus on operational readiness is reflected in its selective approach to customer engagement and service delivery, ensuring alignment with its core capabilities and market demands.
We don’t create a traditional business plan now. We use Viva Goals with our customer-facing project teams to manage progress, align strategy, and create accountability to high-level objectives.
Richard Tree: Chief Operating Officer
CAI
Transitioning from traditional business plans to agile OKRs
Before adopting Viva Goals, CAI relied on annual business plans to align operations with strategic objectives. However, these plans quickly became outdated and less responsive to evolving industry needs. The company found that the static nature of traditional planning methods did not align with the dynamic, real-time demands faced by its scientists, engineers, and consultants, who prioritized solving customer problems on the fly. As CAI expanded globally and added more staff, the limitations of its existing business planning processes became apparent, prompting Chief Operating Officer Richard Tree to seek a more effective approach.
Tree discovered the OKR framework in John Doerr's book "Measure What Matters," recognizing its potential to modernize goal-setting and management. The adoption of Viva Goals initially began with Tree and his operations team, but quickly gained traction across CAI's strategy team as its benefits became evident. Today, Viva Goals has replaced traditional business plans at CAI, empowering customer-facing project teams to manage progress, align strategies, and ensure accountability to overarching objectives.
According to Tree, Viva Goals enables CAI to integrate OKRs into performance reviews and utilize data-driven insights for compensation decisions. The company aims to implement the OKR methodology across all facets of its operations, leveraging Viva Goals to enhance agility and strategic alignment throughout the organization.
Adopting Viva Goals helps us confidently incorporate OKRs for performance reviews and make data-informed decisions about compensation. The intent is to manage every part of the business with the OKR methodology using Viva Goals.
Richard Tree: Chief Operating Officer
CAI
Embracing goal management for global operational readiness
CAI implemented internal training and communicated best practices to ensure the successful adoption of the OKR framework among its customer delivery teams. Key practices included limiting objectives to fewer than three per business unit, and key results to three to five options, while using root cause analysis to justify OKR selections. Richard Tree, CAI's COO, highlighted that crafting effective goals and key results was the most challenging aspect, with Viva Goals playing a crucial role in overcoming these hurdles.
These guidelines help CAI maintain focus on strategic priorities while allowing for ambitious OKRs. Since adopting Viva Goals, the operations team has significantly improved its ability to achieve goals aligned with strategic objectives. Tree noted a notable 30 percent enhancement in diversifying integrated services on engagements since incorporating diversification goals into Viva Goals.
We’ve shown at least a 30 percent improvement in the diversification of integrated services on engagements since implementing diversification goals in Viva Goals.
Richard Tree: Chief Operating Officer
CAI

With strong leadership and commitment, organizations can undergo transformative shifts in goal management and performance through optimized OKR methods and tools. Richard Tree, CAI's COO, emphasizes the necessity of empowered individuals driving meaningful change to fully adopt these approaches. By appointing an OKR Champion in senior leadership, CAI ensured successful adoption of Viva Goals and the OKR framework, enhancing its ability to implement modern goal-management practices effectively.
As CAI became more adept with Viva Goals and OKRs, its strategic focus increasingly centered on employee engagement. Despite the lack of a direct correlation between engagement and individual goal use, leadership prioritizes leveraging technology to enhance engagement across their globally dispersed workforce and client sites. Tree underscores the effort required to foster collaboration and prevent information silos in such a decentralized environment.
The use of Viva Goals and OKRs at CAI has significantly influenced customer outcomes, enhancing the quality of deliverables and showcasing the company's expertise and capabilities. By achieving strategic objectives through effective project management, CAI enhances client satisfaction with improved project outcomes. Viva Goals facilitates streamlined communication between teams and management, enabling efficient progress updates and ensuring alignment for swift decision-making at the customer level.
A notable benefit observed since adopting Viva Goals is the reinforcement of a culture of continuous improvement at CAI. Employees utilize OKR insights from Viva Goals to make data-driven decisions, promoting growth and innovation across projects. Tree highlights how this approach supports ongoing learning and development within the organization, driving sustainable success in a competitive market.
Our employees are encouraged to learn from each project, taking advantage of OKR insights from Viva Goals to make data-driven decisions that foster growth and innovation in future projects.
Richard Tree: Chief Operating Officer
CAI
CAI leverages Viva Goals to achieve project-level transparency, breaking down silos and fostering a unified approach toward its strategic goals. This alignment ensures that customer-facing initiatives are tightly integrated with the company's overall strategic mission, balancing operational agility with strategic focus to meet industry demands effectively.
The adoption of Viva Goals and the OKR framework has significantly enhanced CAI's operational sophistication over the past two years, driving continuous improvement across its business operations. Looking forward, Viva Goals will remain instrumental in promoting alignment, collaboration, and employee satisfaction as CAI expands and evolves. Equipped with these tools, CAI is poised to sustain its leadership in the industry by delivering innovative solutions and purpose-driven customer experiences.