Now, we've, we know our current state is. And now we need to start defining our goals, we need to move on to the next process. We're going to create a SMART goal. SMART goal is something that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and time bound. And Stephen already covered this in the course, if you need to refresh it, go back to that. But let's just practically Now, let's create a SMART goal for our project.

So what we need to do is define our goals. We're going to start with specific, the first part of a SMART goal is we need to be specific. And to do that we might drill down so we might make a statement we want to improve our social media marketing. Let's be a little bit more specific. We want to get more newsletter signups from our social media marketing. Still not that specific.

We want to get more signups so we can sell them digital product, we might have training courses, or information resources that people can buy. But even that is not that specific. So let's, let's see if we can be a little bit more specific. We want to grow our newsletter list by 500%. So as we go down, we can see that we've been more and more specific. So when you write it down, ask yourself, can I be more specific?

Write another line, can I be more specific until you get something that is very clear to you? And now we want to be measurable. What are we going to measure? We're going to measure our social media marketing metrics. How are we going to measure that we will collate the key data in our spreadsheet and update it once per month. So it is going to be very measurable.

And this is important because if a goal isn't measurable, and we don't know how well we're actually doing Is it achievable on a scale of one to 10? With one being very difficult to achieve and 10 being easy to achieve? How achievable do we think this goal will be? See, this step helps us to examine the data with a dose of realism that you could use your metrics in this example from the spreadsheet to compare data points and how much work cost, what a 500% increase cost us based on current practices. Now, that would be a very loose way of figuring out if it's achievable, because we would hope that as we go through the process, that we would improve and be more efficient, and get more reach because we're not just trying to create more work, we're actually trying to get a better return. So we want to do more, but increase waist as well.

But this might be a way have us get an initial idea of what it would cost if we didn't remove any waste. And all he was doing was adding productivity or adding labor to the task. So we now need to be relevant, we need to check our smart go on a scale of one to 10, with one being not relevant and 10 being extremely relevant. how relevant to our business objectives do we think this goal will be? This step helps us to examine the data with a dose of realism. So what we might do here is go back to our business objectives, and see if this matches them.

And remember, we've got that buy in all the time. Oftentimes, the person running the project might not be the owner of the business. But if you can point back to the overall business objectives, then if the project does get challenged at any time, you can then be very clear about how relevant this Is to the business. And finally, is it time bound? We have to decide when this project will be completed what is our expected completion date. In this instance, we want to achieve our goal by September 2018.

So let's have a look at our SMART goal now. By the first of September 2018. We will have grown our email list by 500% as measured by our marketing metrics spreadsheet, we believe this has an achieve ability rating of eight out of 10. This is linked to a high level business objective where we want to increase our market share by 25%. So what you could then do is take this SMART goal and add that to the intranet you could add it to the business objective sheet is on the project page or you could create a new place where you are Smart go to your intranet so that we can remember all the time what exactly what specifically we're trying to achieve. And by when.

So what we've got is we've got a SMART goal template, which you'll find in the resources section as a Word document. What we suggest you do here, as an activity, is go fill it out as practice, because that is going to give you an idea of an experience of creating your own SMART goal. So let's go and have a look at the SMART goal template. But here's the SMART goal template. What do I want to change specifically? How will I measure it?

How achievable is it? Why is it important? Why and when will I have done it? So pick a practice project in your mind with processes and go through and just take this resource and fill out another see you've got four lines here. So what I strongly recommend you do is just fill out four lines. So, you might have one project with four things you want to change, pick that, try that and play with it, you'll find it very, very powerful for helping you to create your own smart go.

Remember, just download this from the resources section is there for you. So you can just download it as a Word document and have a play.