Businesses Require Better Goal Management

Because of the dynamic nature of business today with wars and rumors of wars, pandemics, and weakened supply chains, goals need to rise in importance. While goals should be specific and measurable, goals will change with greater frequency. Therefore, goal attainment will also have to be watched more carefully. We are upping the ante on better goal management and focusing better on the business supports for goal management and goal attainment. Better goal management requires a new level of transparency and communication capabilities than in the past and follows a consistent goal cycle. Click here for a suggested Goal Life Cycle (GLC). While there still will be the issue of variations by legal system and location, the adaptation of staff and automation will have to be faster and sharper than in the past. While there will still be steady-state goals and boundaries periods, the change increases its velocity. What are the foundations for goals in a changing world? This post will dig into the primary foundations around goals.

Goals for People

Better goal management needs a good dose of people power for both the management of the goals and the attainment of our changing goals. In today's world of collaboration, people are a crucial resource for establishing, maintaining, and changing goals. The problem is that collaborations today are somewhat random and not organized around completely transparent goals. When changes occur, the stakeholders that are the goals stewards are not given complete visibility to the change, and worse yet, all the participants are not clued in to how they should change their behavior. Therefore, all goal management and goal attainment activities should be tied to goals naturally and informing way.

Goals for Processes

Better goal management should directly link goal changes to the sequence and outcomes of business processes. All resources that contribute to a process's success need to understand/support the goals, goals changes, and direct actions required for new goal courses. While processes are often on the front line of detecting a need to adjust goals through exceptions or changes in business event trends, their significant contribution revolves around goal attainment. Changes in goals often mean a shift in process actions and even new process paths or step sequences. Collaborations with all the process resources for new or changed purposes are essential; however, enlightened organizations have adaptable processes that automatically adapt to new goals or milestones.

Goals for Programs

Better goal management should allow for quick adaptation of change to existing programs. The program could be a one-time event, like a conference, or a repeatable set of linked people, processes, automation, and platforms. Better program management means that learnings need to be faster and more comprehensive, and responses need to be planned and delivered quicker. It puts a premium on thorough communication and collaboration directly linked to goals instead of random collaborations that are not connected or missed because they appear to be noise communications in error.

Goals for Systems of Automation

The problem with most automation is that they are optimized to deliver on efficiency that depends on stable goals. Packaged and legacy applications, components, and micro-services are created for a known set of outcomes. The maintainers of this automation need to be informed early of any changes as early in the cycle as possible because of the lead time to make changes in this often-brittle automation. Even if automation were designed to flex, we are seeing unexpected scenarios that will likely change the ingenious automation of the past. Therefore, early in the change cycle, synchronized goal change communications and collaborations are a must putting a premium on linking to stakeholder goals.

Goals for Supporting Platforms/Infrastructure

Often unseen supports become a change inhibitor. These could be transportation systems, physical platforms, manufacturing lines, networks, or technical system platforms. Over time these are the last to become flexible and represent constraints on supporting goal changes. Communicating with the stewards and outside vendors about the goal changes has to be early in the cycle. Many infrastructure platforms were designed with a specific purpose in mind, so communicating early and often helps these folks figure out ways to bend or extend the infrastructure. Some infrastructure changes require long lead times.

Net; Net:

We all are trying to deal with change and the downstream effects on all moving parts of the organization that need to know about or change behaviors to support new or existing goals. Communicating in synchronization, preparing for the changes, and implementing the changes needs to be done in shorter time frames in today's dynamic and flexible worlds. It is a much different world than we have been used to in the past. Better goal management, methods, and tools will likely result in our new change-prone world. It may require further training and outside perspective to prepare for better goal management in a world of constant change.

A Goal Life Cycle is Essential for Success

Most of us have seen the strategy to execution gap and wonder how to close it. This is particularly tricky when conditions and situations can modify the goals and the linkages to sub-goals that are driving to completion. Organizations must sense themselves in the context of their changing environment and adjust accordingly to reach top-level goals that cascade and guide in-flight efforts to results. Having an explicit life cycle that everyone understands and subscribes to is a big deal to reach goals and aspirational dreams for organizations and their contributors. This life cycle is the key foundation to goal management and adjustment effectively percolating through the organization in a coordinated fashion to deliver successful business outcomes. It connects well to supporting objectives and key results (OKR) and must have more rigor than just PPT presentations and EXCEL spreadsheets running the complete life cycle. Let’s explore the Goals Life Cycle (GLC)

Goal Creation

Creating upper-level goals is usually done by stakeholders in a cooperative fashion, however, these upper-level goals could be the vision of a strong and trusted leader. The advantage of a cooperative effort is the follow-on support from the functions and organizational unit leaders. These goals will be broken down into contributing efforts, all of which, will likely follow the same goal life cycle at the level they are at without losing sight of the upper goals and their specific contribution to the overall balance needed for success.

Goal Collaboration

It would be easy to set goals without gaining the “buy-in” of the leaders and contributors to the final outcomes. Collaboration should permeate the efforts of creating and executing on the goals set making sure that the goals will bear success, not violate governance and be consistent with the risk profile of the organization or organizations participating in attaining the goals. The collaboration process ensures a more common understanding of the desired results and outcomes with precited measures of success.

Goal Curation

All things good require some burn-in time or time to cure. This is particularly true when going down and out from the core stakeholders. It takes time to get minds around the goals and how they interact with legacy practices if at all. Time needs to be factored into feedback cycles initially or as the goals iterate and evolve. The key is not to allow too much or too little time.

Goal Communication

One of the crucial steps is to fully communicate the goals and any changes as they evolve as fast as possible to all those involved. By directly linking communications to the stakeholders’ goals with visible feedback, gives all a picture of the goals at any point in time. It is also critical to notify all participants when changes are taking place

Goal Co-Adjustment

It is important to evaluate the progress towards goals and the resulting changes. There needs to be an evaluation that determines the extent to which a set of efforts (program) has achieved its goals. This will require collaborative adjustments to bring the results closer to 100 percent success over time. This is where several iterations and variations can be modeled or tried. During the evaluation phase, some goals can be retired or audited for future lessons learned

Net; Net:

We all intuitively know the GLC is often iterative in nature because there are many moving targets these days and following the key sequence of the life cycle helps organizations move closer to success with fewer iterations. Having the proper support in place and working smoothly is also crucial for achieving success. The next posts will hammer home the business and technical supports necessary to achieve a goal-based culture, behaviors, and desired results enabling success. This will be followed by case studies or examples of efforts in the process.