47 Examples of Goals

John Spacey, March 05, 2020

Goals are targets for the future. These are typically described with an action verb, a measurement, a timeline and a description of the desired future state. The following are illustrative examples.

Productivity

Purchase and fully customize a faster computer to improve my output to 30 or more designs a month. Target: January 30th, 2031.

Efficiency

Increase the yield of backyard garden to 190 pounds of vegetables per season by properly tilling the soil and removing rocks.

Planning

Develop a business plan to expand locations by 50% within two years. Measurement: return on investment, risk exposure, estimated costs

Time Management

Reject low value action items to prioritize core work, particularly coding. Measurement: lines of code produced in a month.

Turnaround Time

Decrease the turnaround time for room service beverage orders to 7 minutes or less.

Cost Reduction

Reduce IT license costs by $380,000 per annum by converting desktops to linux.

Negotiation

Negotiate lower prices with coffee suppliers. Measurement: cost reduction

Revenue

Achieve revenue target of 12 million per quarter representing an year-over-year increase of 14%.

Budgets

Control the team budget. Target: compliance with financial processes and a budget variance of +/- 2%.

Internal Controls

Implement an internal control that terminates all non-essential system access when an employee changes departments. Measurement: compliance with security policy.

Business Capabilities

Develop the capability to automatically detect and disable the accounts of ecommerce sellers who are overstating their inventory levels to win orders. Measurement: decrease order delays from third party sellers by 33%.

Strategy

Develop a strategy to challenge competitors in the microgrid market. Measurement: cost, return on investment, feasibility assessment, risk exposure, stakeholder feedback, approval of plan.

Communication

Communicate project goals and urgency to achieve stakeholder buy-in. Measurement: stakeholder acceptance of project proposal.

Influencing

Gain budget approval for the green roof project. Measurement: stakeholder feedback regarding business case, budget approval.

Leadership

Play a technical leadership role on the team. Goal: lead the architecture for at least 3 projects.

Self-Direction

Influence to gain work assignments that are relevant to my career goals. Measurement: assignment to architecture and project lead work for major projects.

Management

Increase the throughput of change requests to implement at least 300 story points a month.

Project Management

Deliver the energy provisioning system project to requirements. Measurement: stakeholder feedback, budget variance, schedule variance.

Administration

Deliver the admissions process. Measurement: admit rate, acceptance rate, capture rate, yield rate.

Networking

Attend telecom conferences to build industry contacts and develop leads. Measurement: contacts generated, qualified leads, revenue from generated leads.

Stakeholder Management

Deliver to stakeholder expectations. Measurement: stakeholder satisfaction with action items.

Work Quality

Increase the quality of designs and design deliverables. Measurement: deliverable acceptance rate, client feedback.

Optimization

Improve customer satisfaction with the business class meal on the London to New York flight with service variations, detailed measurement and optimization. Measurement: customer perceptions and satisfaction with meal service.

Creativity

Design a coffee package that is perceived by customers as more premium than all major competitors. Measurement: customer perceptions of coffee packaging as compared to top five brands.

Innovation

Aggressively experiment with test plots to develop a method of carbon sequestration that leverages fast growing crops such as bamboo. Measurements: carbon sequestered per acre per month, value of crops, cost per acre per month.

Business Development

Launch a battery systems unit to complement our solar panel products. Target: Q3 launch, first year battery related revenue of $40 million.

Business Transformation

Develop and implement a strategy to completely move away from fossil fuel energy within 5 years. Measurement: percentage of energy from fossil fuels.

Procurement

Procure processing and storage units for three new data centers. Measurement: compliance, cost, risk exposure.

Recruiting

Recruit a team of 5 developers. Measurement: time to recruit, first year performance management scores of new recruits.

Training & Development

Provide talented developers an opportunity to lead the development of projects. Measurement: number of project lead opportunities, feedback from developers and stakeholders.

Incident Management

Resolve production incidents with a mean time to repair of less than 30 minutes.

Problem Solving

Resolve stability issues that have caused multiple outages of the settlement system. Measurement: uptime of settlement system.

Decision Making

Develop a tool to calculate accurate margins for all sales proposals and deals. Target: improve deal approvals to increase gross margins to 38%.

Knowledge

Research composite materials to identify candidates that might improve the design of our helmet products. Measurement: feedback from product development team.

Knowledge Management

Capture all project artifacts in the knowledge management system to provide a complete audit trail. Measurement: compliance rate with knowledge management process for projects.

Market Research

Benchmark customer satisfaction against our top 3 competitors. Measurement: feedback from product development and executive team.

Marketing

Promote brand to achieve brand recognition of 60% of target market.

Technology

Automate the baggage check process for all of our flights out of Chicago. Measurements: budget variance, schedule variance, customer satisfaction, return on investment.

Measurement

Measure the turnaround time for third party orders on our platform by requiring partners to provide us with delivery data. Measurement: percentage of third party orders measured.

Reporting

Develop a dashboard that communicates current information security threats, incidents and problems. Measurement: stakeholder feedback.

Customer Service

Improve customer satisfaction with front desk services to four stars out of five.

Resilience

Diversify revenue so that no one partner or customer represents more than 10% of total revenue.

People & Planet

Convert entire fleet of city buses to electric. Goal: 100% electric fleet by Q4.

Risk Management

Identify and manage operational risks. Target: reduce risk exposure by at least 50%.

Risk Taking

Launch at least 15 products to market this year. Target: revenue from new products of $4 million

Disaster Recovery

Goal: improve the resilience of business processes to disasters and disruptions. Target: develop a culture of working from home so that productivity doesn't decline when offices can't be used. Measurement: manager survey regarding productivity achieved by work from home processes.

Usability

Reduce the depth of configuration screens so that users can completely configure their service with a single menu. Measurement: customer satisfaction with configuration process.

Notes

Most of the examples above omit a target date to avoid repetition. However, it is a common and reasonable practice to specify a target date for each goal.