GoalTrak™ User News #9

User News & Stuff Volume 2, Number 5, June 2008

This edition will be of particular interest to those of you who have backgrounds in architecture, engineering, construction and other disciplines where project management is de rigueur.

Goal Setting or Project Management?

While this question does arise, for the most part, our client organization leaders and managers, those who actually run businesses and manage organizations, understand the difference.

We have had people tell us for years that our 4 day Organizational Goals sessions are strategic planning sessions. From our perspective, they are quite different. Strategy is about guidelines; goals are about execution. The perceptions, backgrounds, experience and knowledge base of the people involved determine their interpretation of the subject, hence their response. The same applies to PM and goal setting.

The reaction of a professional project planner to GoalTrak™ as a project management tool is the reality...they are different tools for distinctly different purposes. Goals are higher level objects in the hierarchy of achievement. Each solution to an obstacle or challenge identified in the goal setting process becomes a project that requires planning and execution. Without the goal, there is no need for the project.

At the individual, human level, that project becomes a short term or mini goal. Cleaning out the garage is an example of this. There is some higher purpose for expending the time and energy to do the cleaning. Similarly, a real estate developer has a goal to develop a residential subdivision or an industrial/office park. He hires or partners with contractors to physically get the job done. That's his solution to the obstacle of not having his own construction crews. The contractor manages the solution or "project".

We could spend a lot more time on this issue, however, several of my clients tried using a project management tool to build and track their goals. It didn't work and they cane back to GoalTrak™. The ability of the senior management groups to have instant access to actual progress on goal achievement was not available in the project management system.

Add to this the need for objective performance appraisals and you have the underlying, fundamental purpose of GoalTrak or any other paper or electronic goals system..."What do you want, how much of it do you want, and when do you want it?" Projects are the factories that produce the products, goals.

Regards,

Rich & Steve