Establishing Project Objectives
By Michael Wilkinson, CMF
Managing Director, Leadership Strategies, Inc.
A key activity in successful client relationship management is making sure you manage client expectations. Managing expectations involves four important activities.
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You must understand your client’s needs.
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You must help your client set realistic expectations for the project.
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You must manage the project to ensure that the expectations are reached.
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You must communicate performance against those expectations through out the project.
Let’s focus on the second activity: establishing realistic expectations. At Leadership Strategies, we recommend working with your client to establish objectives for a project. The purpose of objectives is to help ensure that you and your client are on the same page. By establishing performance objectives together, you and your client will jointly define project success. You then are able to manage the project to ensure that the definition of success is achieved. Unfortunately many projects have inadequate objectives or none at all.
Suppose you were engaged by your client to assist in defining improvements to their hiring process. If you are an internal consultant, your client might be an internal department of your own organization. If you are an external consultant, your client will likely be another organization.
You might define the performance objectives as follows:
Objectives for Project HIP (Hiring Improvement Process)
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Document improvements needed to the hiring process and an implementation plan within 60 days of project start.
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Implement the approved “quick hit” improvements within 120 days of project start.
While these two objectives may appear reasonable, you will see that they are inadequate for defining your client’s expectations.
Types of Performance Objectives
We believe that there are three types of performance objectives. We use the acronym “PBS” as a reminder to define project, business and satisfaction outcomes.
Project Outcomes
Project outcomes define the success of the project in terms of project parameters. Project outcomes typically relate to completing the project on-time, on-budget or within a defined scope. Sample:
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Complete development, testing, installation and user training by October 31.
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Complete the project within 10% of the agreed upon budget.
Business Outcomes
Business outcomes define the success of the project in terms of accomplishing one or more goals of the business. Sample:
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Reduce the average time to fill an open position by 25% for hires made in the first 12 months of project completion.
Satisfaction Outcomes
With satisfaction outcomes, the success of the project is defined by the satisfaction of the target audience with the project results.
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Have at least 85% of hiring managers responding indicate satisfaction or high satisfaction with the new hiring process as measured by survey after 12 months of project completion.
Why do you need all three types of outcomes?
► If you are missing project outcomes, you can achieve the business targets and have high satisfaction by the client implementers, but it may be at a cost that far exceeded the budget or timeframe your client management had in mind.
► If you are missing business outcomes, you can complete the work timely and on-budget, and you can have high satisfaction among the client implementers. But client management can be very upset that you didn’t meet their expected, though undocumented, business outcomes.
► And if you are missing satisfaction outcomes, you could have achieved your project targets and have achieved the business outcomes, but the users of the system may be highly dissatisfied with what they have to do to accomplish the outcomes.
At Leadership Strategies, we recommend that you consider establishing performance objectives that cover PBS. Without all three, your client may have expectations that you fail to meet, without knowing it!
To learn more consulting techniques, consider The Facilitative Consultant. The three-day course provides a structured approach and powerful techniques for managing client relationships.
Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company has rapidly become one of the national leaders in facilitation services. We provide organizations with professional facilitators who facilitate executive teams, boards and task forces in areas such as strategic planning, issue resolution, requirements analysis, process improvement and conference forums. Along with being expert facilitators, Leadership Strategies also train people in facilitation, leadership and consulting skills. We offer public classes in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, DC, and on-site private classes for clients around the nation and the world.
