Annual Goals with the Dead Man’s Rule
management, software development
Ran across a wonderful rule when putting together your annual goals.
“A goal that a dead man can meeting is pretty useless.”
- (Comment on Manager Tools)
Some potential dead man’s goals:
- Improve automation on projects.
All I need to meet this goal is a single developer with an ounce of effort to create a single ant file or shell script. I don’t have to be alive to meet this goal.
- Engage more with business customers.
If one of my developers talks to a salesperson in the hallway, check, done.
- Deliver 5 projects.
No one said they had to be big projects, maybe a small production bug fix counts as a project. Again a team could probably do this without any manager.
- Perform maintenance on System X.
Everyone has maintenance, check.
The guys at Manager tools have a really simple model. The goal just has to be measurable and time based. Thus the goals become:
- Automate all projects with maven by November 15.
- Meet a rating of good or better with an annual survey of customer satisfaction for internal customers by September 1st.
- Deliver Project X with less than 10 severe bugs by May 25th.
- Reduce maintenance costs on System X by 50% by December 30th.
Ed Gibbs @ January 8, 2008
There is also a Project Management Acronym called SMART, that is equally applicable to most goals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)
# S: Specific
# M: Measurable
# A: Achievable
# R: Relevant
# T: Time-bound
HTML Linkifier doesn’t like ()’s Try this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART%5F%28project_management%29
Shy’s away in the corner, wearing a dunce cap! Maybe I should have actually read the Linked article you linked at “Comment” on Managers Tools before commenting!
Ho hum!
No the Manager Tools guys are having a lot of fun with the smart acronym the last few weeks.