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.