Vision, Mission, Goals, Objectives and Mesurements

Year start is a good oppotunity to think about vision, mission and goals. I know that there are those cynical of you, who treat vision and mission as a waste of time. I tend to agree. It's a waste of time if you invest in it too much, and it may become a farce when you invest 15 minutes or more in explaining your vision or mission statement to your organization. Vision and mission are a great tool for saying something short and not too meaningful, but there are still important as they do shed light on your VALUES -- what do you value and where you are going to put your efforts.

The much more important are the goals and objectives. This is your opportunity to list the strategic achievements you want to bring. Goals and objectives should be SMART. That is: Specific (not vauge or too general), Measurable (state the measurement as part of the goal), Attainable (be realistic), Relevant (related to your vision, even if you don't have one yet), and -- Time-bound (otherwise it's like an exam without a time limit). There are, by the way, other interpretations for the SMART abbreviation but the main idea stays the same -- be clear and make the goals something that can be checked at a certain point of time and marked as done/not done.

SMART is smart to say but difficult to do, especially when you plan the future, which is what you do with setting goals. Let's take some examples:

• For "Innovation", you may set the following goal: come up along the year with at least 5 new major (define major?) feature ideas, for which at least 3 would be judged as feasible and relevant to the market and at least one would be developed.
• "Quality" is tricky. You may want to give bonus to the programmer who creates the fewest bugs, you may want to read before what Joel thinks on that.
• "Investigating" new domain: what is the target goal to set? I usually set the goal as giving a lecture on the subject, at a certain agreed date. Usually it promises decent investigation of the subject. In some cases I add the requirement for documenting the material in our organizational wiki.

Setting strategic goals for the coming year/quarter/month is one of the most important tasks of a manager. Ask yourself, how you want your accomplishment powerpoint presentation to look like at the end of the period. Or maybe even better, prepare this powerpoint presentation ahead. Then set the goals and tasks that derived from it, aiming at minimum changes for your presentation.

Once you have the goals and objectives you can go back to the vision and mission, it would be much easier now to state them in 5 minutes. And if you don't find something strong enough go for "Bring qualitative value to the organization".