On Wed, 28 Jun 2006 11:31:56 +0100
"Matthew Revell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> In marketing, and project management generally, people talk about
> SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time Bound)
> objectives. An example might be:
>
> * Ubuntu to be the operating system for 10% of all web-servers, as
> measured by NetCraft, by 1 September 2008.
>
I'm a bit worried about coming up with this type of objectives. The
first reason is that it sounds like 'corporate speak'. Marketing is
already misunderstood by the wider community, and us sounding like
managers will only reinforce that.
The second (and more important) point is that I'm not convinced this
type of objective setting technique is actually useful for a team such
as this. SMART objectives need to be challenging but achievable if they
are going to have any value and that is very hard to do when we don't
really know the capabilities of the team, or how much time they can
commit. I think it is actually dangerous to set these types of
objectives if you can't do it right. At best is simply a waste of time,
but if they are too easy or too hard then we risk demotivating people.
We do need to look to how marketing is done in business to see what is
effective in terms of the actual marketing but I think trying to
transplant the organisational techniques used there is dangerous
because we have a very different organisational setup.
I would say the best plan is to agree on what we want to achieve and
how best to go about it, and then work on doing it rather than spending
time worrying about how the objectives are expressed, and measured.
Robert
________________________________________________________
Robert McWilliam [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ormiret.com
Instructions should be read first, or not at all.
Anything else is admitting defeat...
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