Service Thinking > Guidance > Objectives
Guidance Notes
Teams and Organisations should have a clear set of short, medium and long-term objectives.
These objectives should:
- Be committed to in the short to medium term, and then candidate or indicative beyond this.
- Be set by the Team or Organisation in consultation with it’s parent Organisation.
- Be aligned to the objectives of any parent Organisation, supporting their delivery, although this does not mean that all objectives must have a corresponding “parent” objective.
- Be underpinned by just enough planning to give confidence, with the Roadmap describing how these objectives are expected to be delivered
- Be aspirational, audacious, and meaningful, ensuring they represent a challenging target that will have a measurable impact.
- Be realistic and achievable, allowing people to buy into them.
- Be inspiring and motivational, engaging everyone involved in the Team or Organisation, and informing their day-to-day decision making.
- Be timebound
- Be supported by a set of measures that can be used to understand the impact of the delivery of the objective after it’s been delivered.
- Be supported by a set of leading indicators that can be used to track progress towards delivery of the Objective.
- Be reviewed and adjusted regularly through the Review & Setting cycle.
- Drive innovation and elaboration to identify the most effective and efficient way of achieving them.
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Further Notes
Details of some of the topics we plan to publish further topics on will be added here soon.
Please set us know via a reply below if there’s any of these further notes you’d like us to prioritise, if there’s anything you think we’ve missed, or just to let us know your thoughts.
Further Reading
Don’t take our word for it. If you’re interested in going deeper and exploring more, The Index has community curated lists of further reading, including on Objectives and Key Results