Align groups and teams to the strategy

Transcript

Once you’ve defined your goals and associated key results, share the strategy and goals with your primary audience, typically those intended to execute that strategy. Together, refine the goals and set shorter term goals that can be achieved in a defined time period. For example, if your top level goals are annual, break them down into quarterly goals that can be connected to work and measured. If your top level goals were quarterly, you might want to set monthly goals with the teams. You’ll also begin to make plans for how to execute on this strategy. Review and activate proposed goals. Remember, you’ve been operating in a draft state up until now with your goals in Workfront Goals. But, once you’ve refined and finished entering the first few levels of the goal hierarchy, it’s now time to activate those goals. It’s also important to note that your second and third level goals will best map to longer term work initiatives in your strategic planning activities. For example, one to five year roadmaps. After activating the goals, communicate the goals to the teams that will ultimately perform and manage the work that will drive these outcomes. Using Workfront Goals to set your goals and then communicating those goals is a powerful best practice. When teams know where they can see the organizational goals clearly defined and can refer back to that single place for status updates and see the effects of any shifts in priorities, it drives a behavior of alignment and creates clarity within the organization. Work and Workfront can be connected to goals within Workfront Goals so that teams truly see the connection between their work and outcomes. Leveraging Workfront Goals to both structure the data and share the data is critical to getting the most benefit. Cascade and Align Quarterly Goals. Let’s assume that the work you’ve done in setting goals has been with an annual plan in mind. You may want to set quarterly goals at this point. Having a defined and aligned planning horizon, such as quarters or months, keeps data organized and ensures it doesn’t get over complicated. Also, setting shorter term goals helps building a practice of business agility. Planning in shorter time segments makes it easier to shift as the market or the business requires. Your teams can use Workfront Goals to create goals with measurable results for shorter time periods. As you define and refine project plans in Workfront for how you will deliver against these goals, you also start to align activities with these goals. Activities in Workfront Goals can be basic activities created within the goal itself or linked projects from Workfront. We recommend that most strategic work be linked to projects in Workfront. That ensures that the work people are doing is directly connected to a goal, reducing the likeliness that people will spend time on pet projects and increasing the team’s connection to the strategy. Of course, ad hoc activities pop up here and there, and you may not want to build a project in Workfront to manage each one. For that reason, you can add an activity in Workfront Goals that will help accomplish the goal but is not connected to a work item in Workfront. However, this should not be your primary way of identifying work contributing to a goal. After you’ve aligned your groups and teams to your goal setting strategy, you should see something similar to these examples in Workfront Goals. Summary of Recommendations. Launch a cadence for how frequently you will review and set quarterly or incremental goals in the future. It’s recommended to set goals for each planning period, but not to map them out too far in advance, ensuring that you remain nimble and responsive to shifts in the business.