4 Objectives to Ensure Success

daily email

Projects without clear objectives typically fail. This failure may be catastrophic—where the entire endeavour is scrapped—or partial, where the project is completed but vastly exceeds time or monetary budgets.

When planning a project, consider these four types of objectives and see how they apply to your work.

Performance

Performance objectives focus on measurable attributes of your system, often with a time-based element. For example:

The number of widgets produced per hour in a factory
Whether reports have real-time data or are delayed by 24 hours
Webpage load times

To set performance objectives, you need baseline numbers before starting the project and must continue measuring throughout the project’s lifecycle.

Quality

Quality objectives aim to improve non-performance-based attributes of your product. Examples include:

Increasing the durability of a product
Reducing the number or frequency of software bugs
Improving system availability

Timeline

This one is simple: the project needs a deadline.

Everything else being equal, a project finished in 3 months might be a huge success. But if it takes 3 months and 1 day and you miss a critical conference, it would be a failure.

Financial

Financial objectives focus on reducing costs or increasing revenue.

That’s straightforward, but remember: businesses are like onions. You can often tackle financial objectives repeatedly, leading to continuous improvement—but with the risk of overextending a project.

So, what does it look like to move from a poorly defined project to a well-defined one? Here’s an example:

Build feature 𝒳

to

Build feature 𝒳 so that realtime data is available to customers. Reports should be visible within 3 seconds of request. The feature should be available to all customers by the end of October.

The second version is much more actionable and gives a clearer definition of success. Including a due date also forces conversations about scope (e.g., does this include 2 reports or 10?).

Defining your objectives gives you a way to measure success—and that’s the first step in ensuring success.

And knowing is half the battle
– G.I. Joe