How to Develop Business Goals & Objectives
Whether you are responsible for a project, a department or an entire corporation, the ability to set smart business goals and objectives will determine the ultimate success of your performance. While the goals tell you what you are trying to achieve, the objectives will break these general targets into bite-sized tasks. These tasks need to be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented, and time-based. They need to be developed with the end in mind and with the involvement of key staff and team members.
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Instructions
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Establish the overall goals at a meeting of key staff members. This should be a general target. Decide to design a project that will produce an additional $5,000 for the department over the next three months, or acquire the best possible insurance and benefits package for the employees. Those are only two examples of millions you could choose; it all depends on the specific goals of the company.
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Engage in some green-light brainstorming where everyone involved can contribute ideas about how each overall goal could be accomplished. Don't ridicule anyone's idea because the most unlikely suggestions can stimulate a winner. Use a white board or a pad of poster paper to record all of the ideas.
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Assign categories in which each of the ideas can be grouped. Eliminate the ones that are obviously impossible. Rate the remaining ideas so that the ones which seem the most promising rank higher than the ones that might be more difficult to pull off. Choose the best ones as your objectives.
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Engage in a planning process that breaks each objective into its key results areas. An objective might be to obtain contact information from each customer who enters the store, for instance. To make it "SMART," it must be expressed using language that is specific: ask customers to give their email addresses at cash registers. It must be measurable: 75 percent of the customers will agree to give an email addresses. It must be achievable: there must be adequate technology at the cash register to collect and store this information. It must be results-oriented. The email addresses will allow better customer service which should result in increased sales. Finally, the objective must be expressed in a way that is time-based. For instance, after one month, we will reassess the processes involved to see if this objective really works.
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Address each goal like this. Brainstorm to arrive at pragmatic objectives. Then select the most promising to break into key results areas. By making sure that your entire team is part of the goal setting process, you will be able to avoid many obstacles. At the same time, your team members are likely to become more personally engaged in and committed to the project than if they were presented with it without being invited to provide any input.
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