Get started with Adobe Workfront Goals

For additional information about access to Workfront Goals, see Requirements to use Workfront Goals.

Every organization needs to set and communicate clear goals to keep their teams productive, focused, and engaged. Truly knowing how work is aligned to strategy is key to success. Yet, without a system of record that connects your strategy and goals with the work in the organization, attaining alignment can be really difficult.

Workfront Goals helps you define, communicate, and achieve strategic outcomes by connecting strategy to work execution and delivery. You can focus everyone’s efforts on what truly matters, make progress measurable, and enable teams to accomplish amazing results. People can do their best work knowing their contributions have a meaningful impact.

Workfront Goals is an add-on module for the core Workfront work management platform. It is intended to work together with Workfront platform and leverages many of the platform setup and configuration entities, such as users, teams, groups, and projects.

For information about Workfront Goals, see Adobe Workfront Goals overview.

Establish a vision and a strategy for your organization

Typically, the mission and vision of an organization don’t change on a regular basis. But organizational goals often shift based on various factors. There are some key steps to follow to ensure you define and communicate clear and measurable goals to your teams, so that they can achieve what’s important if focus does shift.

We have identified the following steps for defining your vision and strategy for your organization:

• Define and express the end goal
• Collaborate around enterprise and organizational goals
• Align groups and teams to strategy

Define and express the end goal

Create a clear statement which sets the strategic pillars of your vision and will establish the highest level of goals to which your teams and their work will align.

Your highest level goals represent your longer term objective(s), and the higher the goal sits within the hierarchy, the broader the scope.

A goal should represent a value statement that indicates the outcome you are working towards.

We recommend the following:

• Create no more than 3 - 5 higher order, longer term goals.
• Focus on a clear outcome statement when you write goal statements.
• Identify a clear metric by which you will measure successful achievement of the goal.

For information about creating goals and adding results, see the following articles:

• Create goals in Adobe Workfront Goals
• Add results to goals in Adobe Workfront Goals

Collaborate around enterprise and organizational goals

Cascade the high level goals. Building upon the strategic pillars outlined first, mid-senior level management establishes goals that provide segmented guidance of the driving results required to fulfill the vision. For this, we recommend that you do the following:

• Discuss and collaborate with your direct reports and teams.
• Cascade goals from the top level.

Consider the following guidelines when creating and aligning goals:

• Consider the question: “What must my teams and I achieve to drive the accomplishment of this top level goal?”
• Cascaded goals should represent a necessary outcome that must be achieved to drive or enable the achievement of its parent. The scope of that achievement should be more narrow than that of its parent.
• Don’t create complex goal hierarchies that are difficult to follow or have too many layers.

For information about creating and aligning goals, see the following articles:

• Create goals in Adobe Workfront Goals
• Goal alignment overview in Adobe Workfront Goals

Align groups and teams to strategy

Once you have defined your goals and associated results with them, share the strategy and goals with your primary audience. Together, refine the goals and set shorter term ones that can be achieved in a defined time period.

Do the following:

• Review and activate proposed goals.

  So, far, your goals have been in a “draft” state, but once you have refined and finished entering the first few levels of the goal hierarchy, it is now time to activate them.

  After activating your goals, communicate with the teams who will ultimately perform and manage the work which will drive these outcomes. As in Workfront can be connected to goals in Workfront Goals, teams truly see the connectedness between their work and outcomes.

• Cascade and align quarterly goals and add activities to goals.

  If you have set goals with an annual plan in mind, you may want to set quarterly goals next. As you define and refine project plans for how you will start delivering against these goals you will also start to align activities with them.

  Activities can either be basic activities created within the goal itself, or activities can be linked Workfront projects.

• Establish a cadence for how frequently you will review and set quarterly or incremental goals in the future. We recommend that you set goals for each planning period but not to map them out too far in advance, so you can remain nimble and responsive to shifts in the business.

• Update your goals periodically. This is a time where you report back on the progress of a goal.

  For information about activating, adding activities, and updating goals, see the following articles:

  • Activate goals in Adobe Workfront Goals
  • Add activities to goals in Adobe Workfront Goals
  • Update goal progress in Adobe Workfront Goals

Guidelines for setting up Workfront Goals

Follow these guidelines to ensure that you are properly configured to get started:

• Identify the primary individuals in your organization that will be accountable for leading the achievement of each goal. Starting with top level leadership, there will likely be several levels of goal owners. We recommend not more than 3-5 levels.
• Identify the teams and team members who will ultimately be responsible for executing the work required to deliver these desired results.
• Based on these findings, determine who needs access to Workfront Goals.

For information about configuring access to Workfront Goals, see Requirements to use Workfront Goals.

Workfront Goals objects

The table below describes the Workfront Goals objects. You can customize their name by modifying a layout template and assigning it to users, teams, or groups. For information about customizing object names using a layout template, see Customize user interface terminology using a layout template.

Workfront Goals uses the following main objects:

In addition to results and activities, you can also connect projects with goals to show how the progress of projects can drive the progress of the goal.

For information about goals, results, and activities, see:

• Adobe Workfront Goals overview
• Get started with results and activities in Adobe Workfront Goals