Over the seven years that I’ve been running Flintloque, I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve introduced my customers to a really useful, simple idea known as the ‘SMART’ acronym for targets.  While it is a truism to say that all organisations have targets, aims, goals, objectives, whatever one wants to call them, it is not true to say that everyone within each organisation can define clearly and unambiguously what those targets are, and that often includes members of the management team.

When looking at a target, be it organisational, departmental or personal, a helpful question to ask is: “How will everyone know when we’ve hit the target/reached the goal/succeeded?”  Not only can the use of the SMART acronym help to provide the answers, it can be of great help when formulating the question, goal, target, etc., in the first place.  There are a number of different terms that can be associated with each of the letters within the SMART acronym and the list that Flintloque uses is:

S –    specific
M –    measureable
A –    agreed
R –    realistic
T –    timed

One problem that I come across regularly is the acceptance of the same target from Board level to the ‘coalface’.  Now, I’m not saying that all targets shouldn’t lead the organisation to the same place, merely that how one defines a target strategically is not, necessarily, a useful, workable definition when it makes it to the coalface.  For example, the strategic decision to ‘enter a new market and grow sales therein by 25% in the next 12 months’ may be great in the Board Room, but the phrasing should be different when it is communicated to a different audience.  What targets must the department hit to enable the strategic goal to be reached?  What targets must each individual meet to move their department towards the Board’s objective for the organisation as a whole?

The use of the SMART acronym helps management to clarify how targets are to be delivered at all levels within the organisation, preventing targets that are perfectly clear at the upper levels making it un-adjusted to the lower levels where, because there are silent on the actual method of measurement and delivery, they are largely meaningless.  To manage correctly and successfully on an on-going basis, one must define goals and provide objective evidence that they have been achieved.  Making targets SMART is not only a wise habit to develop, it is essential if one is to run an efficient management system of whatever kind.

When any collaborative relationship is undertaken, each participant should be aware that their partner is unlikely to behave in exactly the same way as they do.  One reason for this is that we all take into our relationships, business and personal, certain expectations related to how we ourselves behave.  It should come as no surprise then, that organisations, just like people, behave in different ways and the partners should realise that a successful collaborative engagement requires them to move towards one another and not to expect all the movement to be to their advantage.

When two organisations collaborate, the ‘cogs’ of the organisational machines must be brought together in a way that meshes them to everyone’s benefit.  Failure to control and maintain the ‘gearing mechanism’ between the parties (the engagement process), can result in a lot of unnecessary heat and noise, to the detriment of the forward progress of the project.  What is required, therefore, is a ‘gearing mechanism’ that smoothly integrates the two engines to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

At the end of 2010, the British Standards Institution (BSI) released a new management system standard, BS 11000, which provides a specification for a collaborative framework that can be used in any business relationship.  This new standard contains much useful guidance for the engagement process and the courses that I am running with my colleague Adrian Quayle (one of the people who wrote the BS 11000 standard) help organisations to use best management practice in their engagements, thus adding value to both sides by meshing their systems in a way that prevents their ‘cogs’ from losing teeth.