Following my previous post on the subject, I created the following generic mission statement:
Produce quality code, on time, for the success of the company.
Yes, I know, it's VERY GENERIC, but as a general mission statement for software groups it's quite good.
The problem with a more specific mission statement is that it may miss the responsibility of some of your employees. I had a few years ago a small group dealing with projects for customer applications. In one of our business group talks, the business group manager threw at the entire group that the goal for the team in the following quarter was to achieve sales target of 1M$.
The problem was that it was a group of programmers, not sales people, and achieving sales target was not part of our responsibility. The manager was just pumping down to us his own target (probably adding 25%, just to increase our motivation). The results of this talk was horrible, people were going around thinking how to bring 1M$, instead of doing their programming tasks. It scared some and it totally ruined the motivation of most, who usually do not relate their code to money. Code is art, relating it to money makes it dirty. Instead of speaking of money it was much better to speak about features, projects and deadlines. Even setting for a programming team a target of number of customer projects to achieve is wrong. Mission and targets shall be focused on the responsibility area of the team. It's the manager's responsibility to hide all the rest.
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