Guidelines for Goal Setting

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Goals vs. To-do lists

Not everything you’ll devote time towards qualifies as a project goal. Consider the following example:

I will schedule a meeting with the client

This is an important task, but it’s not a goal. Goals are specific and measurable aims that move your project forward in a tangible way.

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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. Numerous major companies, including: Google, Intel, Spotify, Twitter, Walmart, Target, and others use this goal setting framework.

The main benefits of OKR are:

1. Alignment - every team member be aware of priorities, expectations, and direction
2. Simplicity - OKR goals are easy to create and understand, the framework is content-neutral and can be applied to nearly any project

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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.

In other words, your goals should identify something you need to do as well as a way of knowing when you’ve done it.

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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:

• Learn software packages/tools for constructing and displaying networks
• Clean and process your data such that it is properly formatted for these software/packages
• Try out different network structuring rules and assess the fit/relevance
• Produce presentable materials

Instead you might adopt the incremental goal:

I will learn the data format required for X package, which is commonly used to build network graphs, by adapting an example from the package’s vignette to create a netowrk graph with a different data source.