In my recent Strategy blog I said that to stay competitive you will need to combine your organisations’ goals and objectives, so at this point it is worth reflecting again that goals are general descriptions of your business ambitions whilst objectives are specific, measurable and time bound. In this blog we are only concerned with the objectives and planning to achieve them.
Clear and time bound business objectives are a set of signposts, pointing the way forward to a successful return on investment. Commercially, socially and environmentally clear business objectives can help you to outperform your competitors and explain your proposition better to all who are involved in delivering and receiving them. Operationally, they’re a powerful means of direct communication with your team and financial stakeholders: who is doing what, why and how long it will take to reap the benefits. You are probably already aware that lenders and shareholders will always want to see how you plan to achieve your business objectives, see alignment to your organisations’ original purpose and mission and will often pass opinion and comments on the soundness of them. So it makes sense to write them well, know them inside out and backwards and most importantly get your staff behind them too.
For example: you might have a goal or vision that sounds something like this “We want to create and innovate” or “It is our wish to provide desktop tools for first line staff to spot and manage uncertainty at work ”. These are goals. They articulate your intention but don’t explain what you want to achieve in a way that can be measured. How will you know you are on track?
Business objectives, on the other hand, look like this: “Partner with a digital service provider by the end of Q2, 2021, who will commit to working relationship with us that is viable in both financial and aspirational terms – Benefit – providing our clients with engaging tools that help them embed enterprise risk management in everything that they do”. Tip for you: Now try creating a table including all of the goals you have articulated in your mission statement and match them with objectives that will ensure you realise them. They don’t have to be detailed at this stage, high level will do. You might also want to ‘tweak’ them a bit, once you see them set out like this.
Objectives give you something to work towards. They focus your attention and make sure your resources are directed to appropriate actions. That said, some business objectives might seem to conflict with each other. Long-term growth and expectations about short-term profits may be hard to reconcile. For these reasons it is a good idea to seek out assistance from a project professional at this point, who will be used to writing objectives that fulfil SMART criteria as well as plotting them out against a specified timeframe. They will list and manage the activities that are necessary to meet your objectives in the time you have allocated (and let you know if that time is achievable). They will highlight any conflicts and inform you what resources including staff, budget, systems and tools will be needed to ensure there is no duplication of effort or delays caused by over demand. They will ensure that the right people are engaged to collaborate with one another. This will improve efficiency and ensure that all the benefits you had called out in the beginning will be realised.
Sometimes things don’t go the way you had initially expected them to, so a project professional will ensure that any changes to accountability, timeframes, spend, benefits realisation (or even the original intention) are escalated and signed off by you or your leadership team as and when it is appropriate. A project professional will help everyone to carefully monitor risks, issues or major challenges to achieving your objectives once work is underway, so that you and your leadership team have a chance to support your staff by offering mitigations. They will keep you in the picture once your staff set out.
Objectives will cascade across your organisation. They can be and should be set at every level in your business, all filtering down from those goals you documented in your mission statement. This is the case no matter how long you’ve been trading or how large or small your organisation is. Business objectives include overall company targets, departmental targets, which filter down to the team objectives, and ultimately individuals too. When they’re created in a way that makes them easy to measure, they become an excellent framework against which you can check your progress. We call these key performance indicators or KPI’s. (Watch out for KPI’s. They will reappear again later in the series – probably making a brief appearance in no. 2 on our roadmap – Checks & Balances’ to start with.)
Some organisations find it really beneficial to train certain members of their own staff in project methodologies to aid the constant churn of setting and planning out business objectives. Even if you only review your business objectives on a two or three-year cycle, you might find this approach beneficial. Alternatively an interim project professional, preferably one who is willing to share methodology, will definitely add value. Whatever you do though, please do review your business objectives from time to time because those set when your company is new will undoubtedly need to keep pace with the world in which you operate. I guess it just depends how quickly your world moves? For many companies across the globe, everything has moved rather dramatically lately and I am sure that it has led many business owners and Boards to review their business objectives quite urgently!