Purpose

Goals and objectives provide uniform direction on a project and ensure a consistent vision across the body of stakeholders. Ideally, the goals and objectives serve as a consistent reference for decision making related to the project.

Application

Goals and objectives are publicly available information elements that are normally shared either through meeting documentation or as introductory information in project plans and other project support documentation. The goals and objectives are used to unify the vision of the team and the organization regarding what the project is to accomplish and the general approach to accomplishing that goal. They may be posted in a highly visible location to ensure that they are readily available to all team members. Management theorist Peter Drucker [2] suggests that the goals of a business should drive its specific work objectives, and that those objectives need to be delineated clearly to ensure higher levels of performance.

Content

Goals and objectives should clearly state the intent of the organization, the project, and the tasks or effort under consideration—and the objectives of individual workers in the organization should be complementary in serving the goal. Goal statements are set at a high level, describing what the organization hopes to achieve. They are closely tied to vision statements in that the goals are descriptions of what the organization hopes to accomplish. Goals can be constructed at the organizational level (e.g., “To become a recognized software innovator by changing how software is designed and supported”) or at a more detailed, project level (e.g., “To provide Acme with innovative logistics software that supports their inventory tracking and maintenance”). In either case, the goals are general statements that are supported by objectives.

Objectives serve the goal. They provide clear, unambiguous direction on how the goals will be met. Ideally, they should be sufficiently clear that they allow for self-control and self-monitoring by the team members to whom they are given [2], which means that each objective should have some metric form of measurement that reflects  the organization’s values. If the goal is to provide innovative logistics software to support Acme, the objectives might include the following:

•  To provide a system that provides real-time information regarding material location, storage, and aging;

•  To provide a system that responds with customized (detailed, step-by-step) direction on alternative sources for material that is out of stock or in low supply.

Terms become important in establishing goals and objectives. The assumption that anything that may be misinterpreted will be misinterpreted is a fair and reasonable assumption. One person’s vision of “low supply” might be different than another’s. The effort in building objectives is to minimize the ambiguity as much as is possible and reasonable.

Approaches

A blurry line exists between goals and objectives and between objectives and requirements. As such, one person’s general “goal” statement might be sufficiently detailed to be an objective for someone else (particularly someone at a higher level in the organization). Because objectives should be rendered as clearly as possible, the effort to build in the appropriate level of detail sometimes generates the nascent requirements.

To construct better goals and objectives, goals should address the future state of the project, deliverable, or organization. Objectives should state how the team and the project will work in that direction.

In some organizations, the objective statement is always linked to specific time and cost limitations.

Considerations

Because goals and objectives provide direction, they should be public pronouncements. In meetings and in project facilities, the objectives and goals of a project should be clearly posted to ensure team familiarity with the documentation. Such openness about the goals and objectives can preclude some of the inherent squabbling sometimes evident when project team members seem to be working at cross purposes.

Such visibility should also be accompanied by encouragement of team members to identify any effort that does not seem to be clearly serving the project goals. If some work serves the project goals indirectly, it is important to clarify how that work will ultimately serve the project purposes, so the team members working on those functions will understand their role in the project as a whole.