Setting up goals

Goals are what people are working towards. Before anybody sets one, you decide the vocabulary: the named scales a goal can be measured against, the types a goal can be, and what sits in the shared library.

Where it is

Choose Admin, then Development in the left-hand menu and Goals. It has four views: Goal statuses, Goal library, Goal types and Goal status sets.

Status sets are the important decision

A status set is a named scale — the list of states a goal moves through. A goal picks its set when it is created and keeps it for life.

That is why the screen warns you before you edit one. Changing a set changes how every existing goal on it reads, because those goals did not get a copy of the scale — they point at it.

Two protections follow from that:

An option in use cannot be removed, only renamed. Deleting a status somebody’s goal currently sits on would leave that goal in a state that no longer exists.

A set in use cannot be deleted, and the Default set can never be deleted.

So renaming is your editing tool here. “On track” can become “Progressing” and every goal follows; it cannot become a different number of options without affecting goals already on it.

Designing a set

Design it once, before goals exist, because that is the only moment it is genuinely free to change.

Keep it short. A scale of four states people can tell apart beats one of nine that get used interchangeably — and because options cannot be removed later, an over-long scale is a decision you live with.

The list shows how many goals use each set, which is the number to check before touching anything.

Goal types and the library

Goal types are the kinds of goal your organisation recognises. Goal library holds organisation-wide and shared goals — goals written once centrally rather than by each person.

A library goal is the route to consistency where everybody is working towards the same thing. Personal goals sit alongside them rather than replacing them.

Where goals are used

Goals appear on a person’s Develop page, and a workflow item can read or write goal scores during a review — which is why the workflow readiness check refuses a launch where an item writes goal scores and no score field exists to read them. See How workflow launch works.

What happens when you save

A renamed status appears wherever that status is shown, immediately, including on goals already sitting on it. Nothing is notified and nobody is told their goal now reads differently — which is worth remembering before renaming anything people look at daily.