Measuring Goals

JD Dillon, CMO, Tioga Energy: Measuring to Optimize Goals

JD Dillon prepared slides for FountainBlue’s January 8 Front Line Managers Online program, and shared some thoughts on how to optimize goals based on metrics. With his permission, we are sharing top ten best practices as well as his charts.

1. When optimizing goals, be specific on what your metrics are, and get agreement on whether what’s being measured actually reflects the goals for the product, team and organization. In the example above, JD comes from a semiconductor manufacturing background and shared metrics around cycle times and defects and %EDI.
2. Once you’ve decided what’s being measured, consider creating three separate goals:
   • The ‘Plan’ is the formal and official commitment, one that is signed and approved and widely understood by people throughout the organization, and by partners and even potentially across the industry.
   • The ‘Model’ is the best possible result, given current resource levels. Knowing this number may help facilitate discussions on how additional people, financial or equipment resources would impact established goals.
   • The ‘Entitlement’ is the best possible result, if everything goes well. If you commit to the ‘entitlement’ goal, the odds are high that your project will fail, for by definition, you would be committing to a ‘best possible’ result.!
3. Commit to a Planned goal, and provide regular updates on how your actual work is mapping to these goals.
4. Negotiate for additional specific resources so that you can deliver on planned goals in specific ways.
5. Be clear how having specific additional resources would impact goal timelines and product/service quality.
6. In general, aim high for an attainable goal. If you miss the target, you would have more information and can realign in specific ways.
7. If you aim high and HIT the goal, there’s much to celebrate, and you would learn so much about how to do it right.
8. If you aim low and miss the plan, then you would totally fail altogether. If you aim low and succeed, there’s not as much appreciation, it’s not as valuable. People may consider it a ‘sandbag’, like you’re aiming low to do something which may not be as impactful.
9. To increase the likelihood of success, work as a team to be clear on what the goals are, what the timelines are, who has what roles, what could go wrong, etc.,
10. The bottom line is plan well, aim high, communicate regularly and clearly, and collaborate with all parties to deliver on your committed goals. Learn from each success, each failure.

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