Mitchell Glenn Behm, the founder and CEO of Behm Consulting Services, is a dedicated professional who is passionate about developing strong bonds in the workplace built on trust and mutual respect

1. Mitchell G. Behm: Identifying
Project Goals for Successful
Plan Execution

2. Using a systematic and methodical approach projects is a key to
successful execution, explains Mitch Behm, founder of Behm
Consulting Services. Often, planning and monitoring are put
into the background in the rush to move ahead with execution or
reporting results, however, doing this is a mistake cautions
Mitch Behm. In fact, if the necessary time is taken to plan out all
aspects of the project, it saves a lot time and resources later on
in terms of a failed or less than stellar project result.

3. To begin planning for projects, it is necessary to identify
what is it that you are trying to achieve. This
identification of goals helps drive the project down a clear
path. To reach this end, a project team should answer the
following:

4. Who are the stakeholders?
To ensure a successful project, the first step is to correctly
identify who the stakeholders are and a successful project is one
where all important stakeholder needs are met. Stakeholders to a
project may be anyone who is directly or indirectly affected by
the project and identifying the right stakeholders may need some
careful research. Some possible stakeholders include the end user
who receives the output, a customer who receives a finished
product, the project manager, a team, and/or the project's
sponsor.

5. What are the needs of the stakeholders?
Once the stakeholders have been thoroughly identified, you can
now work on identifying the needs of the stakeholders, explains
Mitchell G. Behm. These needs can be clearly stated and easy to
see or implicit and harder to pinpoint, although the most relevant
information can be gathered through interviewing the
stakeholders. It is important that a seasoned professional, like
Mitchell G. Behm of Behm Consulting Services, conduct these
interviews as time needs to be taken to draw out the real issues as
some stakeholders may have some needs that cannot be met
effectively so these need to be recorded separately to avoid
misplaced effort.

6. What are the priorities?
As mentioned briefly in the previous step, not all needs that are
identified can be met effectively. Some cannot lead to actionable
outcomes, some may not make business sense, and meeting some
needs may not end up creating value for the stakeholders. This
makes it extremely important to prioritize all the information
gathered up to this point.

7. How do these convert to measurable goals?
A prioritized list of goals can now be turned into easy to measure
goals. One framework for this is to employ the SMART principle:
specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Formulating goals in this way helps to measure them for
completion and success. Once identified, these goals can now be
put down into the project plan along with a mention of the
stakeholders and their needs.

8. Thank for Watching