Creating Achievable Project Goals

Want to make project goals achievable? Start by making sure they’re clearly articulated and supported by key stakeholders. That’s no guarantee though because other conditions can affect their achievability. Here are actions to help ensure your project goals are reasonable and motivate your project team.

• Include training and experimentation tasks in your plan. You will attract the best team members if your project offers learning opportunities. Include training and the chance to practice new skills with some experimentation in your project plan. This expands team members’ understanding. New skills also pique team member interest in project goals. Businesses must innovate to remain competitive. So, treating projects as learning opportunities in addition to enhancing business capabilities means more value that your projects can deliver to stakeholders.
• Develop success measurement approaches before creating success criteria. A common mistake made by project managers is to define success criteria without understanding how those criteria will be measured. For example, some criteria can be assessed only with subjective measures. This often causes conflict instead of uniting the organization around success. Create the measurement process first, then determine what result will be considered success. Your success criteria will be meaningful and allow you to track your degree of success.
• Focus on business processes, not tools or IT systems. Project staff are more likely to understand project goals when they’re tied to existing business processes. Focus on the new or revised business process objectives. This helps team members understand the direction they need to take to meet project goals. Difficulties occur when goals focus on tools. For example, the goal “Implement a new warehouse security software system” leaves out the problem that needs to be corrected, or what opportunity the business wants to achieve. 
• Set practical timelines. Project team members are more likely to support practical, non-arbitrary deadlines. A practical deadline means the timeframe reflects durations proven achievable in past projects. However, a tight deadline for legitimate reasons can be considered practical if management supports new approaches to help meet the deadline. Tight, but practical timelines require motivated teams, so explain the rationale to them to gain their support. (Think Apollo 11 landing on the moon prior to the end of the decade!)

What else do you do to create achievable goals and obtain support for them? Share with us in the comments section.

For more about defining goals, check out my Project Management Foundations course.

Coming Up

Great Meetings Build Great Teams

Although great meetings won’t guarantee project success, poorly run meetings could lead to project problems. In this Office Hours broadcast, I’ll be talking with Jim Stewart, PMP and Rich Malzman, PMP about how to keep your necessary meetings from becoming necessary evils. 

Find out why you should create a project plan for a meeting, how to handle people who behave differently in meetings. Learn about the science of meetings and how to use it. Listen to lessons learned from real-life meeting experiences. 

Join us for a fun and informative session. (Bring your questions for a chance to win a complimentary ebook of Great Meetings Build Great Teams. Click here to sign up: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7079138489325268992

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