Goals vs. To-do lists

Not everything you do for your project will fall within the scope of a goal. Consider the following:

I will schedule a meeting with the client

While important, this isn’t a goal. It’s simply something you need to do as part your project’s workflow. In contrast, goals are specific aims that will move your project forward in a tangible way.

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) for Goal Setting

In order to facilitate successful goal setting, I encourage your group to adopt the “Objectives and Key Results” (OKR) framework. Many major companies, including: Google, Intel, Spotify, Twitter, Walmart, Target, and more use this framework.

Some reasons for using OKR are:

  1. Alignment - every team member should be going in the same direction with the proper priorities and expectations
  2. Simplicity - OKR goals are simple to create and understand, the framework is content neutral and can be applied to nearly any project

Components of an OKR goal

As the name suggests, any OKR has two components:

  1. Objective - a qualitative description of what you’d like to achieve
  2. Key Results - a set of metrics, standards, or products by which you can measure progress towards an objective

Very often you can craft an OKR goal using the following template:

I will _ as measured by _

In some cases an objective will have several key results. For example:

I will understand the previous data cleaning steps by adding detailed comments to the cleaning script that was previously used and re-running the script to reproduce the cleaned dataset.

Plainly speaking, your goals should identify something you need to do, along with a way of knowing when you’ve done it.

Incrementalism

In this class, your team will report on the progress made towards your goals on a bi-weekly basis. This means that your goals should be achievable within that time frame (under the assumption that each group member is devoting ~9 hours outside of class towards the project each week).

Often you might need to break your larger goals into smaller, more manageable goals. For example, perhaps your ideal goal is:

I will build a network graph displaying connections between the community assets mentioned in the survey responses.

It is extremely unlikely this goal can be successfully achieved in the first two weeks of the semester as it requires you to:

Instead you might adopt the incremental goal:

I will learn the data format required for X package that is frequently used to construct and display networks, and I will recreate examples from tutorials for that package.

Advisor Feedback

When providing feedback on another team’s goals, you might consider: