10 Project Management Goals to Improve Performance

Ask any project manager and they’ll tell you that there’s nothing quite like the excitement you feel when you hit your project goal.

Project management goals and objectives are key for any business success as they outline priorities and expectations. 

But are goals and objectives in project management the same thing and how can you write and set smart goals for your projects?  

In this blog, we give you the answers to these questions and provide you with 10 actionable examples of project management goals that you can put into practice right away.  

What Is a Goal in Project Management?

A project goal is the targeted desired business outcome that the project should achieve. This could be generating a certain amount of revenue, solving a problem, or delivering a top-notch customer experience. Project management goal, on the other hand, is something that is more related to the management process. As a project manager, your project management goal could be to utilize resources wisely, control budgets, or implement proper procedures.  

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Project Management Goals VS Objectives: What’s the Difference?

The main difference between project management goals and objectives is that goals define the general intentions and ambitions of the business while objectives are the precise actions that the project’s team takes to move closer to the goal. 

• A project goal is what needs to be accomplished. 
• A project objective is how the goal will be accomplished. 

For example, a company goal may be to reach 100,000 subscribers on the company’s YouTube channel in 12 months. Objectives related to this goal might include producing 10 videos a month, hiring 2 more video editors, partnering with YouTube influencers in your niche, and performing an SEO audit on old channel videos.  

How to Write & Set Project Management Goals?

Writing and setting up goals is an indispensable parts of project planning. Effective project managers understand the importance of setting the right goals for the overall project strategy. Project management strategies provide a clear plan for better teamwork and help teams address project challenges, and keep track of what’s going on to reach their goals.  

By setting up the right project goals, you are creating the perfect project roadmap to success. When you know what you want to achieve, it’s easier to work towards it. For example, if you really want to improve productivity, you’ll know exactly what you need to do by setting a specific goal that outlines your goals’ objectives, tactics, and best practices to make it happen. 

Before you start working on your goals, you first need to make sure that you formulate them smartly. SMART goals are a goal-setting method that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.  

Specific – Make sure your goals are clearly defined: Increase organic traffic by 30%.  

Measurable – Make sure your goals are trackable: Revamp old blogs and add 30 new backlinks to increase SEO visibility.  

Achievable –Make sure your goals are attainable: Get the right team members to help make this happen on board.  

Relevant – Make sure your goals are realistic: Analyze whether you can achieve that increase in the defined timeframe.  

Time-Bound – Make sure your goals have a deadline: Increase organic traffic by 30% in 3 months.  

Writing SMART goals and then setting them correctly means setting your business up to achieve its goals in a very specific, clear-cut way. 

10 Project Management Goals to Improve Performance

Now that you have an understanding of what project management goals and objectives are and what is the difference between the two, here are 10 project management goals you can borrow to improve your project’s performance:  

1. Stick to Deadlines & Finish Projects on Time

Two of the most important requirements while managing a project are to meet deadlines and finish the project on time. In order to manage time, many project managers use task management tools to track the progress of tasks, dependencies, and milestones.  

Often times critical tasks can be the culprit to delaying projects. Critical tasks are tasks that will directly impact the project being completed on time, project managers must identify them in advance. To make sure that you always stick to deadlines and finish projects on time, you can set a project management goal to determine how long each task takes and find a way to gauge their dependence on other tasks.  

2. Control Budget

Similarly, to the first goal on our list, controlling the budget of a project is also a very important requirement. Every project manager must keep track of project costs and make adjustments as necessary to avoid exceeding the budget. Depending on the nature of the project, costs may include resources such as supplies, team members, administrative expenses, etc. The key, however, to deliver a project within budget is to be able to identify and tame cost escalation during project execution. 

3. Improve Team Collaboration & Communication

There is always room for improvement in team collaboration and communication, which makes this project management goal a great one to strive for. But before you set that goal, you first need to determine how exactly you can improve upon it. It might be something like setting up a messenger channel on WhatsApp, starting a regular weekly Skype meeting to catch up with everyone’s work, or better yet investing in a team collaboration and communication app.  

4. Improve Productivity

Productivity is among the top concerns for project managers. If you’re wondering how to increase your team and project productivity, you should consider acquiring project management software. These types of solutions offer simplicity and reliability and allow your team’s productivity to thrive. Even Forbes listed software adoption as one of the trends to watch in project management and productivity, so, we’re sure that these tools are here to stay.  

With its project management features and functionalities, such tools help project managers manage multiple complex projects with ease and unite all your team members, content pieces, and files in one place.  

Objectives for this goal may include researching different vendors, signing up for product demos, and testing the various solutions on the market. 

5. Manage Stakeholder’s Expectations

Stakeholders are the support system of your project and organization and are directly impacted by the project’s success, which is why it is extremely important for project managers to ensure that their expectations are met (and even better if exceeded). That is especially true for startups. It is one of the trickiest parts of the project management process and so it’s crucial to have a goal that focuses on achieving that.  

Your stakeholders may not end up liking the outcome, but at a minimum, you should call for a special meeting to discuss details if any specific questions arise, report the project’s progress frequently, and produce value regularly. 

6. Optimally Utilize Project’s Resources

Everyone knows that projects are given limited resources to work with – budget, time, people, etc., and project managers’ job is to deliver these projects with these limited resources. The goal here is to find the best way to optimally utilize the resources that you’ve been able to secure for your project.  

This is more than a project management goal, it is also a test of your skill to make the most of your available time, provided budget, and a number of people. 

7. Improve the Effectiveness of Team Meetings

Do you want to make your team meetings more effective? If yes, then this should be one of your top priorities. Before you set a SMART goal for this, however, you need to define why the team meetings that you currently hold are ineffective? What do you think could be improved so they become more effective? Maybe you can reduce your weekly team meetings or present a clear meeting agenda.  

8. Create a Data-Driven Culture

Building a data-driven culture is currently a top goal for many organizations striving to achieve better results. A data-driven culture is when an organization uses data at the center of its decision-making throughout each department. Trusting data to guide your decisions means not starting from scratch, but relying on information that has worked well before, taking it into account, and putting it at the center of what you’re trying to achieve.  

9. Simplify Communication & Collaboration With Clients

Collaborating and communicating with clients is not as easy as most people would think. As a project manager yourself, you know that long-lasting relationships with customers and clients require effort and dedication, they don’t just happen overnight.  

To simplify collaboration and communication with clients, a specific approach is needed – you need to ensure trust, visibility, control, comfortable participation and feedback, and a quick way to transparency in any situation. To do that, you can set a goal to create an easy and clear way for feedback from clients across all levels and projects. Another goal that you could set is to decrease your service call response time or to create a go-to library with all needed assets. 

10. Don’t Stop Learning & Evolve with New Practices

This is a very powerful and professionally oriented project management goal. With the emergence of new technology and leadership paradigms, the project management discipline is undergoing a significant transformation. That is why it is important to keep up with the newest trends, so you can be able to adapt to these changes quickly and implement them in your management style more easily.  

You can set a goal to take a free online course, read project management blogs, join local PM events, and/or attend educational workshops and annual conferences. 

How Can Slingshot Help You Achieve Your Project Goals?

Slingshot has been designed to transform your projects into success stories. It is the only productivity tool on the market that streamlines all the moving parts of every project. Our platform brings together all the tools and insights that your team needs, making it your project control center from where you can easily track the progress of each project and more.  

Slingshot simplifies collaboration by incorporating modern project, task, and team file management, chat, and data analytics, all within one app that you can access at any time, anywhere, and from any device. With robust productivity flows out of the box, Slingshot enables teams to cut across silos, prevents work disruption, and makes it easier for everyone to work better and smarter together.  

When you have everything that you need to manage your project like a pro in one tool, you’ll reach your project management goals easier and faster than ever before. Try it for free today and see how Slingshot can help your team deliver extraordinary results.