- Concrete goals for each initiative that will be carried forward.
A strategy is a framework for understanding what the right thing to do is and for roughly knowing how to achieve goals. In Step 1 & 2, we established the current situation and in step 3, we had a look at the company goals and set the destination for the coming months. Step 4 had us set out a strategy for events. The next step is to set specific goals which is what we will do for each initiative in this step. Let us look at SMART goals and vanity metrics before we dive in.
SMART goals are a commonly used tool to plan and achieve goals [1]. SMART goals are defined to be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely.
WARNING: The caveat to setting SMART goals is being aware of vanity metrics. These can be collected but they should not form the basis of your strategy. Examples of this can be measuring sign ups or measuring visitors on your website. If your team is measured on sign ups this may lead to the team accidentally focusing on activities that will make users sign up (maybe for some bonus) without noticing that they then never actually use the account. The metrics will look great but if your underlying goal is to increase usage then focusing on more long-term metrics like retention of users over time will give a more realistic impression of whether your efforts are working.
Similarly measuring teams on events attended or conference talks delivered may only yield vanity metrics and accidentally encourage the wrong things. Instead you should try to ensure you are attending the right events and that conference talks are well suited to your audiences so that engagement is high.
All the metrics mentioned above are still worth tracking (and I am sure they look wonderful on a dashboard). The thing to keep in mind is that these vanity metrics should not be used to evaluate the team or your efforts. The metrics that you should be more concerned with are the ones that measure impact (not effort/achievements). Similarly, you will want to encourage quality over quantity.
Measuring the effort to impact ratio can be very useful when possible.
- Decide where the created resources should live (GitHub/Google Drive/...) and ensure this is accessible to the team.
- Prepare a presentation of SMART goals (or print out the above section for your team).
As a team go through each initiative one by one and decide what SMART goals you intend to focus on. Ensure the document is complete. For inactive initiatives, ensure that the initiative is left in an ok-state. Ensure stakeholders are informed of the projects status.
This is the last step in the in-person training. Summarize learnings and set a time to follow up on action items.
- During the conclusion or after the training, collect feedback. This will help you make changes for next year. If you are willing to share this feedback, please reach out to me.
- You can choose to set SMART goals after the planning event. Thus initiative owners can think about them in more detail. You should however aim to inform the team of these goals/discuss them with the team.
[1] Smart Goals