Introduction

A project's Objectives are those things that need to be achieved for a project to achieve it's target benefits. They provide the north star that a project team should focus on when making decisions about any other aspect of the project.


Here is an example to provide the context of objectives in conjunction with other aspects of a project ...

  • Benefit: Save the company £60,000 a year of operational spend.
  • Objective: Decommission 120 physical servers.
  • Milestone: Server workloads migrated to equivalent cloud hosted platforms.
  • Scheduled Activity: Migrate the workload of server P0001 to cloud service C0001.


Successfully completing the objective leads to the benefit being achieved.


Milestones and actions are kept separate as they may change and alternatives may be available to achieve the same objective. For example in this example some of the servers may just be switched off without being migrated elsewhere if they are no longer required.


Note: An objective is typically also a milestone, but not all milestones are objectives.


Accessing Objectives

A counter of Completed Objectives is on the Project Home. Clicking the counter navigates to the Objectives home.


Objectives are also accessible from the left-hand side navigation bar...


The Objectives Dashboard

The Objectives Dashboard provides a table of all objectives- complete and incomplete - along with an overall counter showing the number of completed objectives and the combined percent progress of all objectives.


The example in this screen shot shows that none (0) of the 3 objectives have been completed. It also shows that collectively 7% progress has been made towards all objectives. This progress is due to the third objective in the table having progressed by 20% (with 1 of 5 engineers having met the success criteria of becoming certified).


This page has two tabs allowing a user to toggle between Objectives and Requirements

See the Requirements help page for more information.


Viewing/Managing an Objective

Select any objective to enter the editor... 

Selecting an objective opens a form which can be updated...

These form fields are...

  • Status. HORIZON PPM provides the following options to track the overall status of an objective... 
    • Pipeline/Not Started
    • Open/WIP
    • Paused/Queued
    • Blocked
    • Closed - Complete
    • Closed - Cancelled

Note: All new objectives have a default status of Pipeline/Not Started.

  • RAG Status. HORIZON PPM also provides the Red/Amber/Green (RAG) traffic light (with an additional blue C representing complete or cancelled) to indicate the health of an objective.
  • Objective. The title of the objective.
  • Description. A more detailed description of the objective.
  • Success Criteria. The criteria to judge the success of the objective. 
  • Complete. An estimation of the percentage complete of an objective. This is used for the overall calculation of the projects progress against it's objectives.
  • Target Date. The target date for completing the objective.
  • AI Scores: These scores appear in the Project Priorities views that provide clarity to project teams in their prioritisation of the prwork.
    • Urgency. An indication of the urgency associated with completing the objective. This is a time based metric.
    • Scale. An indication of the scale and effort involved in completing the objective.
    • Impact. The material impact of completing the objective - typically in support of the project business case. 
    • Complexity. An indication of the relative ease or complexity involved in delivering the objective. 

Note: All are scored from Very Low to Very High. The default for all AI Scores is Medium.

  • Comments. Comments relating to the status/plans of the objective. These comments are displayed in the objectives overview and on project status reports. 
  • Tags. An optional field to add tags to an objective. To add a tag type the word or words and press the return key (this may be a go button or similar in the virtual keyboard on a mobile device). The system then highlights the new tag in blue but doesn't submit the form allowing additional tags to be added.

Note: Tags are a powerful feature allowing easy identification and access to common items across the projects and portfolios. See the Tag Search page for more details.

  • Last Updated. An automatically updated field displaying the last date/time this objective was updated


Adding a new Objective

To add a new objective select the Add button at the top right of the table.

Adding a new objective opens the same form as described in Viewing/Managing an Objective. See above for details.

Once the form is submitted and the new objective is created the user will be redirected back to the Objectives Dashboard with the table refreshed to display the new objective.


Deleting an Objective

To delete an objective enter the specific objective (see Viewing/Managing an Objective above) and then select the Delete button at the bottom left of the form.

HOIZON PPM will prompt for confirmation of the deletion before proceeding.


Once the user confirms the deletion by selecting OK to proceed HORIZON PPM will provide confirmation of the deletion then return the user to the Objectives Dashboard.