Business Goals

9th December 2016

2 little words “Business Goals” (or “Business Objectives” in ISO speak) that tend to sound alarm bells in many peoples heads, but pause a moment and consider a few questions about your organisation and peoples roles within it before you dismiss “Business Goals” as just more consultant gobbledegook.

If we were to walk around your organisation and ask your staff members “which business objectives do you contribute to?” what sort of response would we get?  If someone can’t answer that simple question then how are they expected to feel part of the success of the business?  Worse still though is the issue of resource utilisation, how do you know that the right resources are focussed on what’s important to the business?  Without such simple understanding how do you measure efficiency?  How do you measure improvement? How do you motivate your staff? How do you demonstrate to the board effective resource utilisation, and if your business is failing how are you expected to know where to look for the root cause?  I suppose you rely on gut feeling and anecdotal views, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a clear map in front of you that connects all of these things?  Enter the Business Goal…………………

There is an art to setting Business Goals, not to many, not to few, just enough to capture the essence of the business. Most businesses should have a round 6 or so key goals, each one being an output type of statement, spanning operational, financial, product and staff related activities. Blunt goals like “make a profit” or “have no warranty claims” need a little refinement, adding some simple measures make all the difference, for instance “make a 7.8% profit” where the 7.8% figure actually relates to a sensible and achievable level of profit, or “achieve a warranty claim level below 3% of products sold” where the 3% figure reflects where you want to be with your product / returns ratio.

For each Business Goal its easy to plot which daily processes help to deliver that goal, so you can build a grid of goals vs processes. Then ask yourself honestly how good you are at each process and rank them. So you should end up with a matrix that charts Business Goals vs processes and how good you are at them. Plotting these criteria should then expose how many goals each process contribute to and how good you are at the process. So the processes that contribute to most goals that you are poor at are clearly the processes you need to focus on to automatically improve your business performance ……… simple.

So to root cause………

For each process devise some simple measures that will demonstrate via hard data (remember our mantra “speak with data”) where the process is failing and there’s your focus for in process improvement.

It gets better, for each Business Goal and process you map individuals that are linked to these suddenly get a clear view of their contribution to the overall business operation, and of course from that you can develop personalised training plans and make performance reviews far more engaging.

Who would have thought those 2 little words could do so much for you and your business. So here’s a new years resolution for you……… set some Business Goals for 2017.

We will return to Business Goals in latter blogs as there’s much more you can do with them.

In the meantime if you need help in setting some Business Goals or walking through the initial analysis of goals and processes let us know and we’ll guide you along.