The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Learn to Create S.M.A.R.T. Objectives for Safer and More Effective Projects and Responses | PPP #82

Episode Date: August 8, 2021

Sharing background, guidance and tips to create S.M.A.R.T. objectives for response, special events or projects

Welcome to People, Process, Progress, Episode 82, Foundation 2, Set Objectives. Today we'll pick up from our previous episode, Episode 81, where we talked about the Foundation 1 of the Foundational 5 of Leader's Intent. We touched on Commander's Intent, where that came from. So this second foundation, and again, a review of the Foundational 5 that thought that, you know, there's five quick things anyone can do, whether you're responding or your project team just to kind of pull things together and that's get leaders intent set objectives which we'll dive into today create a functional organizational structure request coordinate resources effectively and communicate if we can do those things in different arenas they can help things happen but before we get going please silence your cell

phones hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and we will get started with people process progress in 3, 2, 1. Everybody, thanks for coming back, listening to this next episode, visiting the website. If you're new here, welcome. This is where we talk about project management, incident management. We have guests on. The gist of it is we want to hear from people or about people's processes, what they've done, what they've learned from, and hopefully that helps us make progress, like the name of the show. So today, again, we're talking about foundation to set objectives. And this is critical, I think, once we've gotten that leader's intent that we talked about in episode

81. So go back and listen to that one. And we know what we're supposed to do. We know what the intention and leadership of our organization wants us to do. Now we've got to start kind of pulling that together and how are we going to do this, not to the tactical level, but how are we going to kind of wrap our arms about what's happening. So what I'm going to do is go over some definitions and some guidance from different organizations. I used these in the last one too. So National Wildfire Coordinating Group, that's kind of the grandfather of the incident command system that all hazards, basically public safety folks, if you see them, they're using it to some level or another. Incident management teams that travel around like I did.

Also talking about from the project management body of knowledge, and I looked at the seventh edition, the new one that's out. So we'll go over kind of their definition, and then I'll break down based on kind of what I know and probably what you'll have heard to that SMART objective. And we'll get into what that acronym means. Then we'll talk about when do we make these? When do we pull these together? And how do we do this? And I have a good guide both from CanadaCollege.edu I found online. I'll link to that in the write-up.

And then just a sticky note kind of exercise that I learned and that we taught to incident management students throughout my career in the incident command system on incident management teams. That's just a really simple way to do it. You can use a notepad and things like that, but it's really nice to kind of do that sticky note thing. So let's talk about how the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, who, again, is the organization that coordinates all the response for wildfires. So all the fires we've seen over the past few years and beyond the management and the teams and the organization, these are the folks that have that structure. And really where I got a lot of my structure from in the all hazards world, meaning we turned what they do kind of in the mountains and the trees into how we can do it on the street for special events and things like that. And some of the great instruction that I got from mentors and leaders.

So let's see what they have to say about this. And this is from a command and general staff course, which is s dash 420. And this is from unit eight. And so it's a great summary of what we should think of when we think of objectives. And here's what they say in that document. Incident objectives describe the quantifiable end state of an agency's administrators, that's who's in charge, intent for an incident. Quality objectives lead to clarity of purpose and unified effort across divisions through a clearly articulated incident strategy. That's a great way to say that. And so in the all hazards world, even in the wildfire world, the agency administrator, if you think of that's like the department head or the mayor,

or who is it that asked you to come help them that's in charge of that area or that big organization. So in the project management world, an agency administrator could be the C-suite folks. It could be the sponsor. That's kind of the equivalent there. So what they're talking about is we need to have these objectives say, what do I want you to do by when? And we'll get into that in the smart objective thing. And so you'll see a theme when we jump over to the project management body of knowledge's definition of it. And so

how PMBOK in the seventh edition, and this is on page 243 there for reference, and you have to be a member to download it like I did, but you can also buy it. So no affiliation with PMI, but I am a project management professional. So have access to this and I'm a member. But they define the objective as something toward which work is to be directed, a strategic position to be attained, a purpose to be achieved, a result to be obtained, a product to be produced, or a service to be performed. So a little bit different in the project management world because the scope is much wider. In the wildland firefighter world, even the all hazards world, you have a pretty specific, you're doing firefighting, you're maybe evacuating, you're clearing land. Or in the all hazards world, you could be evacuating as well too.

You're doing a special event, something like that. Whereas a project could be anything, right? Each of those things is a project. It could be a process. It could be a new product. It could be anything like that. But I think what's key is something toward which work is to be directed, I think, is a key theme here. So what objectives do for us is they say, hey, everyone, these, I don't know,

three to five or five to six, you shouldn't have a ton of objectives, right? Then it's too unwieldy. But what it should say is we're going to direct our work toward these objectives. Now you go figure out folks that are going to do the tactics in the public safety world or incident management world or project managers with your teams, right? And the subject matter experts. Now you figure out how long it's going to take to do it, how we can get this done, what resources we need. You're going to get into the tactical piece of figuring out how we make these objectives that are overarching come to life and make people safer or get into the tactical piece of figuring out how we make these objectives that are overarching, come to life and, you know, make people safer,

get that product on the line, or whatever we're going to do those objectives, but they're really critical to set. And it doesn't take much as we'll go through some, some quick examples of those. So as I've said, as I've taught, as I learned, smart is the acronym that we want to apply to our objectives. And there's some variation in a couple of these, particularly realistic, reasonable, those kind of things. But SMART is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound or time-based. And so I'm going to break down kind of each of those a little bit more. And then you think about how you've heard objectives perhaps been applied good or not with this criteria in mind. So when we want to be specific, we want to know, is there a high-level description of what's expected?

And does it clearly relay that commander or leader's intent? Remember, it all ties back to that. Measurable. Can it be measured? Is there quantifiable data? Is it time? Is it by a specific amount of ground, the, ground, the number of sandbags reason to stop the water, percent efficiency, we're increasing, whatever, something like that? Is it achievable?

Are we are we going pie in the sky where we're just trying to make grandiose sounding objectives? Or is this a practical thing we can do? Can we get 50 sandbags to stop that water from coming up? Or is it a tsunami and those sandbags are useless? Attempting too much, right? Are we trying to change so much all at one time and projects do this, right? We get funds or we have lofty goals or we see things that we just have to fix and maybe we try and fix them all at once. And sometimes it's too much.

Sometimes that's our leader's intent and we have to work towards it. So is it achievable? Be thinking about that. Is it realistic? And this is kind of like achievable, achievable, but is the objective reasonable, right? Does it make sense from a safety standpoint, from a resource from a time from a spend, you know, all those kinds of things? Is it applicable to the situation, right? Is someone that's in leadership or involved or was in the meeting or somehow, are they slipping in an objective or a component of objective that's not even applicable? Maybe, like we've seen in bills

and laws passed, right? People throw stuff in there. Well, some folks in parts of projects or programs or responses, they have their own thoughts and ideas, too. And they may throw something in there. So let's always let's make sure to if it's realistic, it's applicable. And then time bound, you know, this is a time a rate number percentage kind of thing by a certain amount of time, monthly, quarterly, by the end of this operational period, by when really do you expect something and so that doesn't have to be too kind of dialed in. But if we can think of or make sure that each of our objectives pass the smart test, meaning there's specific enough for people to take it and run with it. It's measurable, we can we can figure it out, right? We can track those KPIs key

performance indicators we like to talk about and performance improvement or project management. How are we going to measure this? Is it achievable? Are we are we just not you know, is it practical pie in the sky? Or is it too much? Is it realistic and reasonable and applicable know, is it practical pie in the sky? Or is it too much? Is it realistic and reasonable and applicable? And is it time bound? Have we put an end date? And that's a that's a pitfall to write whether it's for an operation looking for missing person that's weather

bound, right, we want to search this area by this time, or find the person within, you know, a certain amount of time, maybe it's called outside, or, you know, so many different time bound things that we could put there. But I think you all get the gist of it. So smart objectives are key, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time bound. So we have a good idea of what objectives are that that we should apply this smart acronym to them as kind of a test. But when do we bring these together? Well, in the incident management world and response, it's pretty quick, right?

It's after we've done an initial response, it's when we're gonna bring together our command and general staff. So that's like the leadership of the incident management team, along with those folks that we came to help. And before we get into kind of the weeds or the tactics, which in a project is like when we, you know,

work with our resource managers and we say, we're gonna have to accomplish these things. What kind of experts do we need? How many do you think we need to accomplish this to meet these objectives? Right. Which for us typically are scope and cost and time in a project as opposed to the operational period like we talk about. If you're doing a special event and it's not a response, you still want to get these objectives shored up pretty early so that anything else that happens after that, right? And events sometimes I've talked about are kind of harder than incidents because there can be more politics, more hemming and hawing. But soon after we know, hey, we have this big sport event that's coming, we're all going to have to work together. Let's knock out some objectives together. So we're all working

towards those. And then we can figure out how we're going to use the thousands of resources that we have and accomplish these objectives. And for projects, they definitely, you know, we'll probably have some strategies, some goals overall for an approved project. But certainly once a project is approved, we should start thinking about the objectives of it, right? We know we want to do this product to solve maybe this problem, but we haven't shored up and put the smart on them, right? And so maybe they're not smart enough objectives, but we definitely make sure the project approves first, right? And it should be part of your early charter. So, you know, that early document that just says, hey, here's kind of a rough timeline. It could be by months what we think. Here's our sponsor and a couple other key folks.

We haven't built the team out yet. Here's the objectives, too, that we're going to work with our sponsor and our leaders with to make sure that everyone else aligns with those throughout the whole project. So it's pretty early in the process. But after we've gathered some initial information and people have maybe responded or at least the project's gone through the pipeline a little bit, it's been approved. But it should be pretty early before we start pulling in resources. And before we start saying, hey, we want to do this work by this time, with these number of people, we want to get our higher level objectives to work together. Before we really break it down into the specific task level stuff or the tactics, as we say, in the incident command system.

And I want to say a couple of examples here. So here's some from like a public safety standpoint, kind of the evolution of an objective, right? And you'll hear how it goes from very simple to smarter, frankly, right? So this has to do with sheltering. It was an example that I did in a class that I taught before. So the first one is shelter out of region evacuees, right? So pretty broad, specific, we want to shelter folks that are from out of the region that are evacuees, but it doesn't say by when it's got a couple other elements from smart missing, right? So then we evolve a little bit, we want to shelter x number of out of region evacuees. But I think we can build on that too, we want to provide x number of shelter spaces to x number of out of town regional evacuees within x number of hours. Right? And so that one's probably pretty good. And the next one, we could take it a little bit. But then we get into I think this one kind of mixes into the tactical piece of it. But if we take it a step further, we're really going to that time bound piece. We want to provide X number of shelter

spaces to X number out of region evacuees within X hours on X date, right? So that one gets into, you know, when you have an emergency shelter open and you have to get these number of people, but you can see how you can go from very broad to just sheltering regional folks to sheltering folks at a certain place by a certain time and a certain number that you want to get done. So same thing for projects, you could switch out shelter and evacuees for devices and testing and, you know, changing, improving efficiencies, those kind of things. There's like KPI kind of things without getting too far down there. So that's a bit of a nuance that you can apply the

SMART acronym, you can think about those kind of things, the who, what, where, when, why, and how, and get that balance of kind of with experience, you know, what's, what's going to be kind of two in the weeds and what's not. So how do we pull this together? How do we write SMART objectives? There's a couple examples. I mentioned that CanadaCollege.edu where they put out, which is great, tips for writing smart objectives. So I'm going to read from that a little bit. And again, I'll link to this in the write up. And then I'm going to talk about the sticky note exercise that I've done that I learned. And then I told other folks that really makes things simple. And you can write that, but using those sticky notes is helpful. So a good thing to remember too, which these folks from Canada College point out is goals versus objectives, right? A lot of time those get confused.

And like they say, which is great, quote, good plans have goals and objectives. Setting goals and objectives correctly will help your plan to be successful. However, understanding the difference between a goal and objective can be confusing. I agree, right? Some goals look like objectives, some objectives look like goals, but let's see what they say. I think they really break this out pretty well here. So goals are broad, brief statements of intent that provide focus or vision for planning. Goals are warm and fuzzy. They are nonspecific, nonmeasurable, and usually cannot be attained below as an example of a program goal. And then they give one here, right? So that's a great point, right? You see a lot of organizational goals on their websites or in their mission statement kind of things. And that's

another kind of crossover is what's the mission statement and the objective and the goals. But yeah, it's our goal is to be the best whatever in the world, our goal is to, you know, make the most x product, right? So it's a very lofty thing. And it could it could kind of go all over the place. Here's what they say for objectives. And this is great. Objectives are like stepping stones toward the achievement of our goals. They are meant to be realistic targets for the program or project. Objectives are written in an active tense and use strong verbs like plan, write, conduct, produce, etc. Rather than learn, understand, feel. Objectives can help you focus your program on what matters. So that is a great point in a great way that they wrote that up, right, that they need to

have strong verbs in them, we want to do this thing by this time, right. And so it needs to be very straightforward. And that's a great thing. And you know, the simple breakdown from their example, and how they explain it is, we want to make sure the who, what, when, why, you know, standard is there, that it's applied. And that's a different way of looking at kind of the smart objective piece. But again, if you can say those, as you start to write them, if you've written them before, as you start to improve writing your smart objectives, again, because it's kind of an art, art form to be able to kind of start those or write those early. And, you know, I have this as the second of the foundation five. And originally, it was one of the big three that was taught to me, which was objectives, resources and

organization, I added leaders intent and then communication on there. But because you want to be able to get objectives pretty quickly show up, look around, say, Okay, here's some objectives that we need to do, I believe, talk about that with the other leaders with the other folks here, their support, whether you're responding, or it's a project or coming on to, and then get rolling toward those. So as you practice doing these, you know, you could think about right smart objectives for your family barbecue, right, like three of them, write them for your family vacation. I actually did that once, of course, I'm super nerd on the incident management, but I wrote an incident action plan for a cookout for either 4th of July or Memorial Day. But it's great practice, right? And it makes it kind of fun. So sticky notes, they're cheap,

they come in all different colors. And that's very helpful. So for the sticky note exercise, I want you to think about a project you're doing a response you've done before an event you've been part of, and think about issues, what are the issues we're trying to solve that are either, you know, something's burning, there's a disease there, right? Go figure with COVID. We're inefficient in this area in the company, whatever it is. And what you do is on the various colors, you write down your issues. So on one color, write down issues that have to do with this and this other color, write down issues that have to do that. You can do this with all the same color ones too. This is just a kind of way to group them. And so then what you do is first write them down, just, you know, two, three words, three, four words, nothing long, just what's the issue,

what's an overarching issue. And then secondly, group the like issues together, group ones that are similar, right? And if there's duplicates, because it could be you and other folks working together, not, you know, not just you. So when you do this with other people, these are going to be joint created objectives. So the joint issues should be agreed upon too. So pull the ones that are alike together, get rid of duplicates, see if you can merge ones that are real close together, you know, talk that through and then start looking at how you can smart, you know, apply that smart objective piece to them and put them in kind of more coherent sentence sentences like that, right. And so here's some examples. And again, you want

to keep it less tactical and but not too broad. And so here's an example of you you know, how I've done it. I read those shelter ones before. So here's one that I think is kind of on the money, right? We want to provide feeding to X number of people in X number of hours, right? That's pretty good. It's specific. We're going to provide feeding. It's measurable, right? Number of people, a number of hours. It's achievable, we think, right? We'll have to have that discussion depending on the number of people. Um, is it realistic? Is it relevant? Um, if these folks are hungry, if it's, you know, our family that needs to eat certainly. And as a time-based sure, an X number of hours, or you could change that to buy X time, right? So if you're, you know, this is, you know, your objective is the overall barbecue or cookout. Something that's probably too broad,

let's say, is we're going to feed the whole city. That's a pretty broad statement. It's kind of a lofty goal, right? Or too strategic, too tactical on this is we're going to provide PB&J at this location and place every sandwich on the table by this time in these spaces, right? Like, that's where the breakout between this overall incident or project objective stays above that specific task to be completed for the project or the tactics that operations will do for the incident management team or response. And again, this, like many other skills and many other industries comes with practice, but it's a critical item. Once you know what our leader

wants to do with the leaders or the group of leaders wants to do, then we got to get these objectives set. And once they're set, they're not set in stone forever, right? And that's a thing about kind of adapting, becoming more iterative. And, you know, in the incident management world, you have, you have this planning P, right? You, spronces up the leg and the O kind of part of the P is doing these series of meetings and reevaluating same thing for projects right in waterfall we typically like to say oh all this stuff at the beginning is how it's going to be throughout but the reality is you know I've used example when you test five things in a lab and you put 500 in the environment you're going to get different results right stuff's going to happen so you have

to kind of reevaluate your objectives is Is this objective still valid at this point in time with the information we know now? So don't think that an objective has to be static written in stone, right? Other than if it has to do with life safety, that should never be compromised. But if it has to do with, you know, we thought we wanted to put this process in place, and we found out it's actually creating a problem for these other folks. You know, that's a very basic example. But thank you so much for listening to this episode, for putting your objectives together and making one of your objectives listening to the show. If I could add one for you, it would be for you to have learned more about the importance of objectives, when to apply them and how,

and to then share the show with folks and give me some reviews on Apple, iTunes, or other platforms to help spread the word, help bring this to the top as far as what pops up in people's radar. Thank you so much for keeping me on your radar, for checking out peopleprocessprogress.com, the Facebook page, People Process Progress, also on Instagram. Please let me know if you have any questions, any feedback, peopleprocessprogress at gmail.com. Please stay safe out there. Wash your hands and Godspeed.