I have to say (and in case you haven’t seen it), Josh’s post on Putting Goals on Paper and Sharing Them is really encouraging to see. http://smbitpros.com/2008/09/12/putting-your-goals-on-paper-and-sharing-them/
As manager of N-able’s business consulting team, I can speak first-hand about what a positive (and profitable) impact this practice of taking the time to clearly define and document business goals brings to our partners and the IT service provider community in general. It has been a fundamental first step in our 5 step process for 5 years now, and we have done 894 goals-setting engagements with evolving MSPs in the past 3.5 years alone. We use the same SMART paradigm in our exercises with partner companies as a test of each goal, but goal-setting should go beyond that to assure it is complete, hardened, and understood by key stakeholders in the company. Other key attributes of each goal include:
1. Goal Priority; make sure you prioritize all of your goals so that you can focus on urgent issues first.
2. Goal Relevance; knowing why a given goal is important, and what the expected result of its accomplishment would be.
3. Supporting Objectives; most goals require a series of smaller, component activities to be achieved. Identifying and documenting these will make your plan more executable.
4. Time Constraint; this speaks directly to the ‘Timely’ characteristic mentioned in Josh’s entry above. Have one for each of your supporting objectives.
Once you have all of your corporate goals documented and rationalized, don’t forget to share them internally with your company. If employees know what they are working towards, it builds interest and inclusion. Better yet, structure employee performance reviews and compensation directly on their contribution to your corporate goals being achieved.