Measurable business goal model

It's important to identify simple measurable business goals

A business or individual who wants to build or buy software does so because they want to reach particular goals. Sometimes they're not even clear what those goals are. Sometimes they recognize those goals as problems they wish to eliminate.

In some organizations those goals might be stated a number of different ways in documents that charter or fund the project. Goals may be spoken of in a number of different ways by business stakeholders within the organization. Often those business goals are stated in an ambiguous or inconsistent manner. This makes it difficult for any one person to deliver a consistent answer on what the business goals are. If the business goals are unclear, how then can we determine if software being built helps the business reach those goals?

A good first step is to pull business stakeholders together and attempt to agree on goals. For some, a trip to the dentists office might sound more appealing. Arriving at a list of business goals with a group of stakeholders is often difficult and results in goals written in such a way that all business stakeholders can agree on them – which often means they're imprecise. What's also common are goals stated in such a way that it's difficult or impossible to determine if the goal is being met or if progress is being made towards meeting a goal.

What helps a project most are concise easy to leverage business goals coupled with metrics that allow the business and the software's designers to determine if the product is successful. These goals act first as a target for choosing user constituencies to support, and features to build. Without this design target, successful results are unlikely, accidental and often but sadly undetectable.

A measurable goal model distills business goals to their simplest representation

The business goal model actually doesn't look the way you'd normally expect a model to. It's not composed of boxes connected by lines, rather it's a simple bulleted list of goals, and metrics associated with each goal. There should be very few goals, 1-5. Each goal should be supported by metrics that help us measure progress towards that goal, 1-3 metrics per goal.

Also in the goal model is the context for which this goals and metrics apply. The context might be the product as a whole, a shorter term project to build out the product, or an individual release of the product. A shorter range, more focused, context will help focus the goals.

A best way to construct a goal model is to use a collaborative work session. Follow the general approach to a collaborative work session to create a business goal model.

During a work session you'll follow an approach of questioning each goal by asking "how would we know if we were making progress towards this goal?" The answers to this question will help identify the metrics we'll use to measure progress. This approach is based on the Goal Question/Metric/Metric Method described by Van Solingen and Berghout. It also feels a bit like practicing the "5 Why" technique originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda and now commonly used in Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma processes.

Further reading

• Goal/Question/Metric Method
• The Toyota Way