Project objective

In project management, project objective is a business benefit that an organization expects to achieve as a result of injecting project product(s) into itself or its environment.

The term business benefits above refers not only to strictly monetary gains, but to all kinds of changes in parameters describing the workings of any organization that bring it closer to its goal.

Project objectives are often confused with project products, e.g. The objective of our project is to install system X. In such a case apply the So what? test. You can also ask Why do we want system X? several times to discover the benefits of having system X in place.

A more formal way to define project objective is: a desired change in key performance measures (indicators) of an organization, resulting from the interplay between project products injected into the organization or its environment and the organization itself.

The terms performance logic or strategy map are used to refer to the formal description of a system of causally validated measures of organization's performance; see also balanced scorecard. One can also construct a performance logic for the project. Another helpful tool might be Goldratt's Future Reality Tree.

Types of objectives

Project objectives can be divided into three categories:

• main objectives (the reasons for doing the project)
• additional objectives (the benefits achieved "by the way", but not the reasons for doing the project)
• non-objectives (the benefits that are not to be expected as a result of the project). Care should be taken to list only such non-objectives that can be reasonably expected by project sponsors or other interested parties, but are not going to be achieved by the project. E.g. a project to implement SAP R/3 is not going to reduce the cost of data entry, although this might be expected.

Structure of a project objective

A well-written project objective should comprise of the following:

• identification of a performance parameter to be modified
• definition of or reference to a measurement procedure (operational definition) used to objectively determine the value of a performance parameter
• current value of the performance parameter to be changed
• date of measurement of the current value
• target value of the performance parameter (which should be measured by the same measurement procedure for comparability of results) to be achieved to consider the project a success
• date of achieving the target value of the performance parameter.

At least main project objectives should be expressed in the above format.

To refine this picture, one could establish both required target values (must be achieved to consider the project a success) and desired target values (to be aimed at, but procject will be considered a success even if they are not achieved).