IDENTIFYING PROJECT GOALS

Introduction: Defining project goals, scope, and success criteria

Welcome back. By now you should have a better sense of how the different parts of the initiation come
together to form the beginnings of a project. So far, you've outlined the key components of project
initiation and, most importantly, you've learned that a lack of preparation during this stage can lead to
problems later on. We're going to continue honing (trau dồi) your project preparation skills. Once we're
done here, you'll be able to define and create project goals and deliverables, the guiding stars of your
project. You'll also be able to define project scope, the boundaries of your project, that state what is and
is not part of your project. You'll be able to identify what's in-scope and out-of-scope for a project and
you'll be able to recognize scope creep (sự thay đổi phạm vi) something you'll need to keep a close
eye on to help you reach your project goal. Finally, you'll be able to explain different ways of
defining and measuring your project's success criteria.
Before we get started, I'd like to talk through an example that we'll follow for the rest of this course.
Imagine that you're the lead project manager at Office Green, a commercial landscaping company that
specializes in plant decor for offices and other businesses. The Director of Product at Office Green has an
idea for a new service called Plant Pals to offer high-volume customers small, low-maintenance plants,
like little cacti and leafy ferns, for their desks. As the project manager, you've been tasked with managing
the roll out of this new service. As we go through this course, we'll return to your role as the project
manager at Office Green, to help teach you about project goals, deliverables, and success criteria. You'll
also see the role your team and stakeholders play in creating and following these three important
components. At the end, you'll compile everything you've learned into a shared document that you can use
as a portfolio to share with future employers. After this course, you'll move on to the next phases of the
project life cycle, and so will your Office Green project. Enjoy.

Video - Determining project goals and deliverables

Welcome back. In this video, I'll define project goals and deliverables and explain why they're important.
Then I'll teach you how to determine whether a goal or deliverable has been well-defined, which means
it's got enough detail and information to guide you towards success. First things first, to set up a project
for success, and to make your job easier, you want to figure out what needs to be done before you actually
get started. You need to define exactly what your goals and deliverables are, so that you'll be able to tell
your team members what to do. You need a clear picture of what you're trying to accomplish, how
you're going to accomplish it, and how you know when it has been accomplished. Let's define project
goals so that you can start to figure out what your project team needs to reach it. The project goal is the
desired outcome of the project. It's what you've been asked to do and what you're trying to achieve.
For example, your goal could be to improve the response time to customer inquiries via email by 20
percent. The goal of your Office Green project might be to increase revenue by five percent through a
new service called Plant Pals that offers desk plants to top customers by the end of the year. Goals are
important because they give you a roadmap to your destination. Without a clear goal in mind, how
can you know where to go or how to get there? Now, one of the biggest differences between what
makes a good goal and a not-so-good goal is how well it's defined. Meaning: how clear and specific
is the goal. If the goal is your destination, are you confident you'll know when you've arrived? The
examples I mentioned before, to improve the response time to customer inquiries via email by 20 percent,
and to increase the Office Green revenue by five percent are two well-defined goals because they tell you
what you're trying to achieve. But wait, there's more. These goals also tell you how to do what you've
been asked to do. In this case, it's via email and through a new service offering, and that's not all. These
goals clarify the goal even further by saying "to improve by 20 percent and increase by five percent."
Now we know where we're going. Well-defined goals are both specific and measurable. They give you
a clear sense of what you are trying to accomplish. Really great goals have even more detail, but I'll get to
that soon. When you start a project, take time to review your goals and make sure they're well-
defined. To do this, you might need to get more information from your stakeholders. Talk to them about
their vision for the project. Ask how this aligns to the company's larger goals and mission. By the
end of that conversation, you and your stakeholders should agree to support the project goals in
order to avoid running into issues later on. Here's an example from my own experience as a project
manager. Our team had finished a new product feature. Our stated goal was to deliver an early version of
this feature and collect user feedback. When we delivered the feature to one of our key customers for user
feedback, the customer didn't have anyone available to try it out. Our team debated whether or not we had
met the goal if we hadn't collected user feedback. Some felt that we hadn't achieved the stated goal while
others thought we did. The customer was satisfied with our team's ability to deliver a feature in the
timeline stated. But our internal team, wasted valuable time going back and forth about it. That said, make
sure that before you start your project, you, your stakeholders, and your team are all clear on the project
goals so that you know you're making the right kind of progress. I'll teach you a process for how to do this
coming up. Once you have the goals nailed down, it's time to examine the project deliverables. Project
deliverables are the products or services that are created for the customer, client, or project
sponsor. In other words, a deliverable is what gets produced or presented at the end of a task, event,
or process. Take the goal to improve customer response time. The deliverable for that goal could be the
creation of email templates for responding to typical questions. Your Office Green project goal to increase
revenues could have these two deliverables: launching the plant service and a finished website that
highlights the new kinds of plants being offered. These are considered deliverables because they describe
tangible outputs that show stakeholders how additional revenues will be generated. There are all sorts of
project deliverable examples. A pretty common one is a report. When a goal is reached, you can visibly
see the results documented in the chart, graph, or presentation. Deliverables help us quantify and
realize the impact of the project. Just like needing well-defined goals, you need well-defined
deliverables for pretty much the same reasons. Deliverables are usually decided upfront with the
stakeholders or clients involved in the project. They hold everyone accountable and are typically a
big part of achieving the goal. Make sure to ask questions about what the deliverable should be and
have everyone share their vision and expectations of the deliverables so that you're all on the same
page. Coming up, you'll practice the art of defining your goals even further following the SMART
method. Enjoy.

Explore: Project Plant Pals: Initiation

Refine goals with stakeholders
First, you will meet with the Director of Product (the project sponsor) to discuss their aims for the project.
To clarify these goals and keep the project on track, you’ll turn them into SMART goals.

Assess stakeholder power and influence

Next, you’ll get to know some of your stakeholders and find out how they fit into the project. A
stakeholder analysis and power grid will help you decide how best—and how often—to communicate
with team members, investors, and more.
Assign roles and responsibilities to promote the service
To promote Plant Pals, you’ll assemble teams to plan the marketing and sales strategy and redesign the
website. You’ll use RACI charts to determine who should be responsible, accountable, consulted, and
informed about various project tasks.

How to set SMART goals

Welcome back, by now you know that goals are important to the success of your project, and you know
that they need to be well-defined in order to help keep your project on track. Since your deliverables
depend on your goals, it's in your best interest to get those goals as well- defined as possible. Lucky for
you, I've got an easy method for doing just that: setting SMART goals. I already mentioned that goals
should be specific and measurable. The SMART method to evaluate goals add three more
considerations for success. Be attainable, be relevant, and be time-bound. Put them all together, and
what do you have? SMART goals. As an entry-level project manager, you may or may not be setting the
project's main goals, but you will need to be able to identify and clarify them as needed, and that's where
the SMART method can be a valuable tool. Let's take a closer look at each term. As I've already
mentioned, if your goal is not specific, you'll have trouble figuring out how long it should take to
complete and whether or not you've accomplished it. For example, if the goal is simply to improve
customer service response time, that's not very specific. It does tell you what you want to achieve in
general, but it doesn't say anything else. If you improve response time by one percent, is that enough? If
after five years response time finally goes up, is that enough? How about if only half of your staff
improves their response times, but the other half stays the same. Specific goals should answer at least
two of the questions I'm about to ask. What do I want to accomplish? Why is this a goal? Does it
have a specific reason, purpose, or benefit? Who is involved? Who is the recipient? Employees,
customers, the community at large? Where should the goal be delivered? Finally, to what degree? In
other words, what are the requirements and constraints? Next, we want to set goals that are measurable,
meaning we can determine that they were objectively met. Measuring is not only a way for people to
track progress, but also a tool to help people stay motivated. You can tell the goal is measurable by
asking how much, how many, and how will I know when it's accomplished? Sometimes the success of a
goal can be measured with a simple yes or no. Did you learn to play the guitar, yes or no? You will need
to measure most of the goals you have with metrics. Metrics, what you use to measure something like
numbers or figures. For example, if your goal was to run a five kilometer race, then distance in kilometers
is your metric. At Office Green, the project goal is to increase revenue by five percent. In this case,
revenue is the metric. Lastly, consider benchmarks or points of reference to make sure you're choosing
accurate metrics. For instance, if your overall goal is to increase revenue, you can look at last year's data
as a benchmark for deciding how much to increase revenue this year. If last year's revenue increased by
three percent, then an increase by five percent in a booming economy would be a reasonable goal for this
year. Ok, so the goal is specific and measurable, but is it attainable? Can it reasonably be reached based
on the metrics? Typically, you want goals that are a little challenging to encourage growth, otherwise,
what's the point of the goal if nothing's going to change? However, you don't want it to be too extreme or
you'll never reach it. You'll have failed before you even started. Aim to find a balance between the two
extremes. For example, let's take the goal to run a 5K. Say you regularly run 2.5 kilometers, three times a
week. An attainable goal will be to go from running 2.5 kilometers to running five kilometers within four
weeks. An unattainable goal might be earning first-place in the 5K. I mean, it could happen, but it's not
likely, especially if you've never run a race before. But how can you know if a goal is attainable, if it's
unfamiliar? A clue to helping you figure out if your goal is attainable, is to ask: how can it be
accomplished? Break down the goal into smaller parts and see if it makes sense. Going from 2.5
kilometers to five kilometers over four weeks means increasing your distance by a little over half a
kilometer each week. That's not so bad, use the same process on your Office Green project goal.
Businesses usually conduct quarterly reviews. So let's assume that increase is expected to occur over the
course of a year or four quarters. In order to meet the goal, you need to see an increase of at least 1.25
percent each quarter, seems pretty reasonable to me. What wouldn't be reasonable is setting a goal of
increasing revenues by 50 percent or 100 percent, unless your research showed that business was
improving that quickly. Your goal is specific, measurable, and attainable. Now let's see if it's relevant. In
other words, does it make sense to try and reach this goal? Think about how the goal lines up with other
goals, priorities and values. Ask whether the goal seems worthwhile. Does the effort involved balance out
the benefits? Does it match your organizations' other needs and priorities? Everyone, from the client, the
project team, and the people who will ultimately use the product, need to feel like the goal is worth
supporting. Also, consider the timing. Both the amount of time the project will take, as well as the larger
economic and social contexts can have big impacts. There might be a budget to complete the project now,
but will the company be able to sustain the project over time? Is there an audience that will continue to
use the product or service once it's delivered? Once you've got the answers to these questions, you should
have a clear goal to help steer the project. If you still don't feel confident about the project's goals, keep
digging. It's okay to ask questions if you have doubts. Communicate your concerns with the project senior
stakeholders and your direct supervisor if you have one. They should be able to address some of your
concerns so that you can feel confident about moving forward. If you're feeling good about the project
being relevant and attainable, and you've made sure it's measurable, and has the specifics to keep you and
your team focused the final item on the checklist is to make sure it's time-bound. Time-bound means
your goal has a deadline. Deadlines give you a way to track your progress, otherwise, you may never
reach your goal or never even get started. Time and metrics often go hand in hand, because time can also
be used as a metric. Making your goal time-bound gives you a way to break down how much needs to be
accomplished over time. For example, if you need to increase revenues by the end of the year, you can
break down how much you need to increase each quarter, month, and week, and there you have it.
Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound: a nearly foolproof method to create and
evaluate project goals. You know what they say, work smarter, not harder. As we continue in this module,
you'll learn about project scope and see how having clear goals supports all other decisions that come up
during a project.

SMART goals: Making goals meaningful

In this lesson you are learning to define and create measurable project goals and deliverables.
Now, let's focus on SMART goals.
Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals are very
helpful for ensuring project success. As you start your career in project management, you
may not directly set the project goals, but you should be able to clarify and understand
them. SMART goals help you see the full scope of a goal, determine its feasibility, and clearly
define project success in concrete terms.
Let’s recap what we discussed in the previous video by taking a look at a breakdown of the
criteria for SMART goals below:
 Specific: The objective has no ambiguity for the project team to misinterpret.
 Measurable: Metrics help the project team determine when the objective is met.
 Attainable: The project team agrees the objective is realistic.
 Relevant: The goal fits the organization’s strategic plan and supports the project charter.
 Time-bound: The project team documents a date to achieve the goal.
You may see variations on what each letter in the “SMART” acronym stands for. (For example,
you may see “actionable” or “achievable” instead of “attainable” or “realistic” instead of
“relevant.”) However, the general intent of each of these terms—to make sure the goal is within
reach—is always similar.
Focusing on the "M" in SMART
Let’s take a moment to zoom in on the M in SMART, which stands for measurable. Having
measurable goals allows you to assess the success of your project based on quantifiable or
tangible metrics, such as dollar amounts, number of outputs, quantities, etc. Measurable goals are
important because they leave little room for confusion around expectations from stakeholders.
Not every metric will have value, so you will have to determine which metrics make sense for
the project. For example, measuring how many meetings the software engineers on your project
attend on a weekly basis may not be the most valuable metric for a productivity goal.
Alternatively, you might measure other aspects of the engineers’ productivity, such as a
particular number of features created per engineer or a specific number of issues flagged per day.
Defining a SMART goal
Let’s explore an example related to making a personal goal measurable. Imagine you are looking
to make a career change, and you set a goal to complete a Google Career Certificate. You can
measure the success of this goal because after completing the entire program, you will receive a
certificate—a tangible outcome.
Now, let’s determine how to make the remaining elements of this goal SMART. In this example,
your specific goal is to attain a Google Career Certificate. You can make this goal attainable by
deciding that you will complete one course per month. This goal is relevant because it supports
your desire to make a career change. Finally, you can make this goal time-bound by deciding
that you will complete the program within six months.
After defining each of these components, your SMART goal then becomes: Obtain a Google
Career Certificate by taking one course per month within the next six months.
Key takeaway
Determining metrics can be extremely helpful in capturing statuses, successes, delays, and more
in a project. As a project manager, identifying meaningful metrics can help move the project
toward its goal. Additionally, by defining each element of a project goal to make it SMART, you
can determine what success means for that goal and how to achieve it.
Video - Navigating Peer/Self Reviews
Hello again. Throughout the program, you have the chance to practice project management skills in a few
different ways. In addition to multiple choice and short answer quizzes, you complete hands on activities
to apply what you've learned. You'll solve common project problems in real world situations and create
the kinds of artifacts project managers use every day. Completing these hands on activities is really
important to your success in this program. They'll give you practical experience that can help you
describe your skills in interviews or use them to manage projects more effectively in your personal or
professional life. To help you prepare, I'll introduce you to two different types of hands on activities
that we prepared for you. I'll also share some tips and tricks that will let you get the most out of
them. And one type of activity, you review a project management scenario and follow step by step
instructions to move the project forward. Your job could be to learn about stakeholders, assigned task
owners or organized documents, so they're easy to find. You can recognize these exercises as quizzes with
activity in the title. When you finish an activity, we'll take you through an exemplar of the completed
assignment that you can compare to your own work. Be sure to review these exemplars carefully, so
you know what you did well and how you can improve next time. Keep in mind that some activities can
have more than one right answer, just like real problems can have more than one solution. The exemplars
for these activities explain one way of doing things, but they also point out where you could do things
differently. This helps you check your approach to an assignment, not just your answers. Certain activities
also include quiz questions that help you check your work. These quizzes can be graded or ungraded and
give you another way to measure your progress and expand your knowledge. Another type of hands on
activity is the peer review or peer graded assignment. These activities follow a similar format to the first,
you will review of project management scenario and complete a set of step by step instructions. But
there's one major difference, your classmates will grade your assignment and you'll grade theirs. For each
peer review, you need to grade at least two submissions, but you can grade more if you want. This peer
grading process is a key part of the learning experience for this program. That's because it gives you
objective feedback on your work and let you know how others are approaching the same challenges. Peer
grading gives you the chance to learn not just from us, the instructors but from each other as well. To
grade each other's work, you will use what's known as a rubric, a rubric as a checklist of items your
assignment must include, with each item worth a certain number of points. You typically need to
score at least 80% correct to pass a peer graded assignment. So for example if a rubric has 10 points, you
need a minimum of 8 points to pass. In addition to using these rubrics to grade your peers, you can review
them before you submit your own assignments, so you understand how you'll be graded. Peer grading is
also important because it lets you give and receive qualitative feedback. For example, if a peer does well,
you could tell them they did a great job refining a goal or that you like their creative solution to a
problem. Positive feedback helps you and your peers learn about your strength and motivates you to do
your best work. On the other hand, it's just as important if not more so to learn from your mistakes. If a
peer get something wrong, be sure to leave thoughtful, constructive feedback, so they understand why
they didn't get full credit. That way, they'll know what to review and how to improve, so they can become
better project managers. And don't worry, we'll give you some tips on how to leave constructive feedback
for each activity. Peer review is a valuable tool, but unlike other assessments in the program, it may take
some time to receive your grades. Remember that real people aren't as fast as computers, so we can take
up to 10 days for grades to appear. Additionally, it can take some time before there are assignments
available for you to grade. Be patient, your peers may be working through the course at a different pace
and remember you can always move on to other items in the course and come back if you need to. If for
any reason you aren't able to access a peer submission or if a submission is incomplete, you can skip it
and go to a different one. To learn how to do this, continue onto the optional reading. This reading will
also tell you more about the peer review process and link you to helpful resources on topics like where to
find your feedback and how to change your sharing settings and google docs. So be sure to check it out.
Great. Now that you know more about some of the hands on activities to find throughout the program,
you're ready to get started.

Don't forget to land: Measuring project success

In this lesson, you are learning to distinguish the difference between a project launch and a
project landing. Let’s focus here on the difference between launches and landings and how to
ensure that your project will be completed successfully.
You will often hear companies celebrating the launch of a new product, service, or initiative, and
it is important to remember that even when your project is out in the world, your work isn’t
complete. When working on a project, the goal isn’t simply to launch it, but to land it. Landings
occur once your project achieves a measure of success. As project managers, landings are what
we strive for and what we celebrate. They are the ultimate reward for all of our efforts.

Launching vs. landing a project

In project management, a project “launching” means you have delivered the final results of the
project to the client or user. You can’t solely base project success on when the client accepts
the project, though. Your work on a project won’t be complete until you “land” it by
thoroughly measuring the results. This is when the success criteria and the metrics you defined
initially when setting SMART goals will come in handy.
Teams should be clear on what they are trying to accomplish, beyond just launching something
to users. Will your project increase retention? Will your project speed up a product feature?
Depending on the product and situation, the answers will differ, but it is important that your team
aligns and works toward the same measurable goal.
Launch first, land later
Let’s consider an example: imagine you are a project manager for an eco-friendly organization.
Your organization asks you to create a training program for middle school students in your
county to teach them about the impacts of recycling. The county's goal is to increase recycling by
20% over the next five years. You gather your team and start developing the learning content to
build out this training program. It takes you and your team one year to complete the research,
development, and production of this training. When you hand over the training to the school
district, you are launching the project. In order to know your project actually landed at the
intended goal, you need to check back in periodically over the next five years to see if the
training program is on target to produce a 20% increase in recycling in the county.
Launch and forget
A common mistake of many project teams is to “launch and forget” the results. This happens
when a project manager delivers the project to the client and the client accepts the project
delivery, but the project manager doesn’t assess if the project deliverables satisfy the customer or
user. In the example above, if you didn’t check back periodically over five years to assess the
results, you would have only launched—but not landed—the project. Launching and landings
work in tandem to ensure true success.
A project landing shouldn’t create more hurdles. If done correctly, a landing creates greater
alignment within the teams on the end results you all desire, and it gives everybody on the team
better visibility on how to achieve success.
Key takeaway
Launching your project to the client can be a very big moment for you. You handed over the
project to your client and now you can take a step back and breathe. But make sure you land your
project, as well. Look over your notes, talk with your team, meet with the client, and
remember to return to your intended deliverables and metrics to help you measure success.
Defining success criteria
Hello again. We've learned about the differences between launching and landing, and we've also learned
about the differences between delivering your project and finding out if the outcome performs as
expected. But how exactly do you know that your project is a success? How do you know if you've
actually landed? At the beginning of the project, you defined goals and deliverables that are measurable—
meaning that you can determine if they were met. Similarly, you need to define success criteria that can
also be measured so you'll know whether they were met. The success criteria will tell you whether or not
the project as a whole was successful. They are the specific details of your goals and deliverables that tell
you whether you've accomplished what you set out to do. They are the standards by which the project will
be judged once it's been delivered to stakeholders and customers. Defining success criteria also clarifies
for your team what they're trying to accomplish beyond just launching something to users. Is it to increase
customer satisfaction with the service so they can continue to purchase more products? Enhance an
existing feature to retain customers? Depending on the project, the answers will be different. But, it's
important that a team is aligned and working towards a shared goal. Sometimes forcing the conversation
and clarifying what the end result looks like can bring to light questions and areas of disagreement.
There isn't a set process for determining success criteria, but I'll break down a couple of key points to
consider.
Remember the measurable part of your SMART goals? One of the questions to ask when making your
goals measurable is: How will I know when it is accomplished? The same question applies to your
project: How will you know when it's done? Only in this case, you want to ask: How will I know when
it's successfully accomplished? You can measure to determine your project success in a similar way to
measuring a goal. So go through your project goals and deliverables, review the scope, and identify the
measurable aspects of your project. These are going to be any of the metrics used in the goals and
deliverables, along with your budget and schedule details. Another thing you'll need to do is get clarity
from stakeholders on the project requirements and expectations. This is key! There are lots of people
involved with any project, and that means lots of ideas about what success looks like to each person.
You'll want to ask questions, such as: Who ultimately says whether or not the project is successful? What
criteria will be measured to determine success? What's the success of this project based on? Once you've
collected clarifying information, document and share all of it so that you, your team, and your
stakeholders can refer to it later. Let's try creating success criteria with the Office Green project. For
example, the goal is to increase revenue by 5% by the end of the year. One of the deliverables is a website
with a gallery of the different plant selections that are offered. It's not enough just to make a list of
criteria; you need a process for measuring success from start to finish throughout the entire project life
cycle. This way, you can make adjustments and ensure success by the time you're ready to land. There are
many metrics you can use, and for some products, it will make sense to use more than one. The metrics
you choose should be as closely aligned to your project's goal as possible. For example, "happiness
metrics" measure user attitudes and satisfaction, or perceived ease of use, and you can measure these
through surveys. For the Plant Pals project, we may consider a customer satisfaction rate of 85% within
the first three months of launching as a way to measure success. You can also consider customer adoption
and engagement metrics, along with more business-oriented metrics that track things like sales and
growth. Adoption refers to how the customer uses and adopts a product or service without any issues.
Engagement refers to how often or meaningful customer interaction and participation is over time.
Adoption metrics might include launching a new product to a group of users and having a high amount of
them use or adopt it. Engagement metrics might include increasing the daily usage of a design feature or
increasing orders and customer interactions. Using the Office Green example, tracking how many
customers initially sign up for and use to Plant Pals service is an adoption metric. Tracking how many
customers renew their Plant Pals service, post about it, or share feedback are engagement metrics.
Once you've defined the metrics that you'll be measuring, think about how you track these metrics.
Evaluate which tools can help you collect the data you need to ensure you're staying on track. For
example, if you're measuring business metrics like revenue, consider tracking that in a spreadsheet or
dashboard, where you can easily spot gaps and trends. If you're measuring customer satisfaction, you can
think of a way to incentivize customers to participate in regular email surveys and create a system to
measure their responses when they participate. You can also utilize your project management tools to
check on efficiency metrics, like what percent of tasks are completed or whether the project is progressing
alongside the planned timelines.
It's smart to measure success with your team as a project or product is in progress. For example, you can
hold a project review once a month, have team members complete task checklists by certain deadlines, or
hold live feedback sessions with your users or customers.
There are many different ways to measure success. The key is to pick the methods that work best for your
success criteria. It's a good idea that, along with each success criteria on your list, to also include the
methods for how success will be measured, how often it's measured, and who's responsible for measuring
it. Share your success criteria document with your stakeholders and ask if they agree with how the
project's success will be determined. It's also a good idea to have the appropriate stakeholders sign off on
the success criteria. This way, everyone will be clear on who is responsible for which tasks, and you'll all
thoroughly understand what the path to success entails. Keep this documentation visible throughout the
duration of the project and clearly communicate it with your team every step of the way. They're the ones
who will be attempting to meet all the different requirements, so don't keep them in the dark about what
they're supposed to do or how they're supposed to do it. If done correctly, defining your success criteria
should create greater alignment within the team and give everybody better visibility into how to achieve
success. Clarity around success metrics also helps teams prioritize which efforts are most impactful to
their users.
Defining project success is a complex but crucial part of project management. With more and more
practice, this process will come more naturally to you in the planning stages and throughout your project.
We'll continue exploring and talking more about these concepts throughout the course. Nice job! You're
almost done with Module 2. I'll see you in a bit to review what we've covered.

Tracking and communicating success criteria

We recently covered the topic about launching and landing projects, and now we will turn our
focus to ensuring that our landings are successful.
Recall that SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound and
help keep a project on track for success.
We can also determine the success of a project by the quality of the product, the ability to fulfill
the needs of your customers, and the need to meet the expectations of your stakeholders. For this
reading, we will discuss these particular success criteria, the metrics we use to track them, and
how and why we communicate our findings.
Product quality
The product, or final result, of a project has its own set of attributes that define success. The
product attributes that are necessary for the product’s success include completeness in features,
quality of features, unit cost, usability, etc. The extent that a product is complete will contribute
to the product’s success. This can apply to any project in which you deliver a product or tangible
outcome at the end. To keep us on track for success, we can create a list of product requirements
to ensure that you do not miss anything. For example, if the project produces word processing
software, you need basic features like text entry, formatting, saving, and printing. Since you
require each feature to have a functional word processor by today’s standards, you include these
features on your checklist.
To measure the success of a product, consider including these metrics on your checklist:
 Track if you implemented the product’s priority requirements
 Track and assess the product’s number of technical issues or defects
 Measure the percentage of features you delivered or released at the end of the project
What is important to the customers or stakeholders
We have to pay attention to product metrics, but we also have to be mindful of stakeholder and
customer additional expectations for features and objectives. In the word processor example, a
stakeholder may want to add an additional functionality to easily create tables in a document
with text. Additionally, a strategic goal of the organization could be to create word processor
software with more collaborative ability than the word processors currently on the market. Each
component is necessary in order to meet customer and stakeholder expectations. Think about
what needs the project satisfies for your stakeholders or customers. These strategic goals tie back
to the business case and the reason you initiated the project in the first place. Often, you can
measure the fulfillment of strategic goals via user or customer metrics. Metrics to consider
include:
 Evaluating user engagement with the product
 Measuring stakeholder and customer satisfaction via surveys
 Tracking user adoption of the product by using sales data
Document, align, and communicate success
Understanding where we are and where we are going helps the project team determine if they are
on track. As you learned in the video on this topic, you need to get clarity from stakeholders on
the project requirements and expectations. There are many people involved with any project, and
success will look different for each of them. You want to ask questions, such as: Who ultimately
says whether or not the project is successful? What criteria will be measured to determine
success? What is the success of this project based on? It is best practice to get the key
stakeholders or the steering committee to review and approve your success criteria. This
becomes a mutual agreement on how all parties define the success of the project.
Key takeaway
Remember, all projects encounter change. All parties must have continuous access and alignment
to the success criteria agreed upon to avoid scope creep (uncontrolled change of the project’s
scope) or failed expectations at the end of the project. It’s important to document success criteria
upfront and continue to report on it throughout the project. You can make a copy of this
document to help you get alignment or download it here:
Success Criteria Template

DOCX File

Using OKRs to evaluate progress

In this lesson, you are learning to define a project’s success criteria, the measurable attributes project
managers use to determine whether or not a project was successful as a whole. This reading will
focus on using OKRs to evaluate a project’s progress.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
You have learned that OKRs—Objectives and Key Results--combine a goal and a metric to
determine a measurable outcome. Setting OKRs is a technique that can help project teams define,
communicate, and measure shared success criteria.

Objectives: Defines what needs to be achieved; describes a desired outcome. Key results: The
measurable outcomes that objectively define when the objective has been met

Communicating and tracking OKRs

Conducting regular check-ins and actively tracking progress with your team can help ensure that
objectives are being met and that any issues are resolved as soon as possible.
Share your OKRs with your team. Once you’ve created OKRs for your project, it’s important to
communicate them to your team so that everyone knows how to focus and align their efforts. You
can do this by sharing a digital document, presenting them in a meeting, or adding them to an
internal website. OKRs can help your project team stick to its goals, monitor which are falling short,
and be continuously motivated to meet project objectives.
Assign owners. Assign an owner to every key result so that everybody knows who’s responsible for
what. This helps add clarity and increases accountability.
Measuring progress
Measuring your OKRs is an important part of tracking and sharing your progress. One shortcut to
determining the status of a project is to score or grade your OKRs. While scores or grades don’t
provide a complete assessment of a project’s success, they’re helpful tools for determining how
close you came to achieving your objectives. You can then share your OKR scores with project
stakeholders and team members as part of your overall project updates.
Determine how you will score your OKRs. OKRs can be scored in different ways. You can score
based on a percentage of the objective completed, the completion of certain milestones, or a scale
of 1 to 10, for example. You can also use a “traffic light” scoring approach, where red means you
didn’t make any progress, yellow means you made some progress, and green means you completed
your objective. The simplest approach to scoring OKRs is the “yes/no” method, with “yes” meaning
you achieved your objective and “no” meaning you didn’t. Using this approach, a key result such as
“Launch a new widget marketing campaign” might be graded a 1 or 0 depending on whether it was
launched (1) or not (0). A more advanced scoring approach is to grade your key results on a scale.
With this method, if a key result was to “Launch six new features” and only three new features were
launched, the OKR might be graded 0.5. Generally, if the KR helped you achieve the objective, your
OKR should receive a higher score; if it didn't, your OKR should receive a lower score. At Google,
OKRs are usually graded on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 meaning the objective was fully achieved.
Each individual key result is graded and then the grades are averaged to determine the score for
that OKR. Set your scoring expectations. With Google’s 0.0–1.0 scale, the expectation is to set
ambitious OKRs and aim to achieve an average of at least 0.6 to 0.7 across all OKRs. For OKRs
graded according to percentage achieved, the sweet spot is somewhere in the 60–70% range.
Scoring lower may mean the team is not achieving what it could be. Scoring higher may mean the
aspirational goals are not being set high enough.
Schedule checkpoints. It’s important to regularly communicate the status of project OKRs with your
team and senior managers. For example, it can be helpful to have monthly check-ins on the
progress of OKRs to give both individuals and your team a sense of where they are. Typically, at the
end of the quarter, you’ll grade each of your OKRs to evaluate how well the team did to achieve its
goals.
Key takeaway
OKRs can help you define and measure your project’s success criteria. In order for OKRs to be used
to effectively meet your project’s success criteria, it’s important to share them with your team, assign
owners to each key result to ensure accountability, measure your OKRs’ progress by scoring them,
and track your OKRs’ progress by scheduling regular check-ins with your team.
To help you get started practicing writing your own OKRs, check out the templates below. To use the
templates, click the links below and select “Use Template.”
 OKR Scorecard Template Doc
 OKR Scorecard Template Sheet
If you don’t have a Google account, you can download the templates directly from the attachments
below.