We make New Year’s resolutions for our health, our finances, our relationships and more. But how about for our projects? Kent McDonald at ProjectConnections wrote about how to go about creating project goals for 2010 in his latest article:

Goals, especially those of the measurable type, are excellent ways to know when a project is successful. Having a clear idea of what problem the project is intending to solve doesn’t hurt either. Yet it can be surprising how many projects start without any idea of what problem they’re solving, and finish—assuming they finish—without any idea of whether they solved it. Weird.

One example he gives is a project described as follows: “Change the system to gather the customer’s wedding anniversary, shoe size, and eye color.” The problem here is the motivation – what purpose can be served by gathering these 3 kinds of information? Is the project being scheduled in response to an actual business problem? Sometimes we plug along without even asking questions such as this.

You can read the article for some suggestions on how to use problem statements and requirements gathering to improve your projects in the new year.