It might sound like the most obvious thing in the world, but if you want to successfully deliver something to your organization you must set clearly defined objectives that allow you to understand what you are trying to achieve and ultimately review ‘has this been successful?’. 

According to PMI the primary cause of technology projects failure (37%) is lack of clearly defined objectives and milestones.

So why is this? If we know it’s important to the overall success, why is setting and tracking defined objectives forgotten about or pushed to the backburner?

Well, there are lots of reasons this can happen but here are a few of the main ones:

Focus on onboarding

At the start of any technology initiative, the focus shifts from how we are trying to improve our business to how are we going to get people using the technology. The objectives turn from business to functional goals in order to onboard the solution. This is normally the correct course of action as it is critical that solutions are successfully implemented from a technical and adoption perspective. However, this becomes so much of a focus that business goals get pushed back and we judge our success on the implementation. It is critical to assess the overall success against the original business goals and formulate a plan for delivering these objectives post onboarding users.

Unforeseen Change

Changes happen in all businesses and what you thought might be your top objectives 12 months ago can be completely different today. If you don’t assess and adapt your objectives regularly, they quickly become out of date and can be thought of as unachievable. It is important to have overarching goals and a clear plan on how to get there, but the plan must be agile enough to change as the needs of the business changes.

Moving on to the next big thing

In an ideal world, if you are implementing new technology, you form a team of experts that can help you throughout the whole onboarding project and move with you through the lifecycle of the technology until you achieve all your objectives. However, we don’t live in an ideal world! The likelihood is anybody implementing technology is having to compete with other requirements of the business for resources. Resources are likely to go towards certain tasks (technical, training, user comms) during the onboarding phase but then are pulled onto other projects once you are really trying to hit your business goals. This normally leaves a much smaller group of people to deliver on these goals, and there is a good chance they are having to move on to the next big thing as well.

So, what is outcome driven success and how can it help me?

Being laser focused on the outcomes you want to achieve is critical to your success. This is achieved by ensuring that you set out clear business and onboarding goals upfront, understanding the success factors you will use to judge their success and being agile enough to adjust them when needed.

You do not need to do this alone, the BigHand customer success team are focused on delivering outcome driven success, working closely with our customers through their journey to assist them in tracking and achieving their goals, ensuring they’re getting the most value out of their current solution.

The customer success team will be in touch to set up these meetings, but if you want to get a head start, please reach out to me or your CSM.