Examples Of Project Management Goals To Set In 2024

Poor project performance cost businesses 11.4% of their investment value annually and causes 70% of projects to fail. Project managers that wish to stop the leakage must aim to set professional project management goals to improve their skill set. Those that do will become invaluable to the firms that employ them.

But where do you start? Which project management goals are a top priority, and which can wait? In this post, we’ll look at the top key project management goals that every project manager should strive to achieve.

Why Set Goals For Project Management?

You’re reading this post because you care about your professional advancement. Setting clear goals helps you to clarify the path that you need to take, and you’ll then be able to identify the steps that you must follow to get closer to your project management goals.

The key to achieving more throughout this process is setting clear targets. Think of it like a roadmap. If you don’t know your destination, how can you find a clear route to the end?

If you want a goal to be more than a simple wish, it must be SMART. But what does a SMART goal stand for, exactly?

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R – Realistic
T – Time-dependent

Examples of Project Management Goals

To get you started, we’ll look at some of the most important project management goals. Working toward these will help you improve your performance and become a more valued employee.

1. Improve performance and productivity

Every project manager’s first task is to ensure that they finish projects on time and within budget, therefore that is the first project management goal we’ll review. An exceptional PM looks for ways to do things smarter, faster, and more efficiently.

You’ll have to analyze past projects to look for areas for improvement. If the project ran behind, what caused the delays? Were there areas where you could have tightened up performance? Were there unavoidable delays?

Approach the matter entirely objectively. It’s natural to want to shift the blame if something went wrong. You might, for example, blame delays on suppliers not delivering building materials on time.

While there’s not much you can do if someone lets you down, you can learn from the experience. In the future, for example, you might plan for this eventuality and create alternative work for the team. Numerous reports show AI for project management might be really helpful. That way, if things don’t go according to schedule, your teammates won’t be sitting around.

If there was truly not enough time to complete the project and nothing else you could have done, that’s a lesson too. You’ll know how to discuss a project with your client next time.

Analyzing past performance is never a waste of time. It enables you to plan better in the future and prevent the repetition of past mistakes.

To make the goal more specific, work towards improving part of the process every time. Refresh your knowledge, keep up with new techniques, and learn how long similar projects take other PMs. Look for tips on improving your productivity and performance.

2. Find ways to boost communication

One of the best ways to improve performance is to boost communication among team members. This is a critical project management goal. Working as a cohesive unit is the best way to ensure that things move along smoothly.

Again, look at the past performance to identify problems in this area. Did you communicate your expectations with the team correctly? Did they have the opportunity to ask questions or give feedback?

If you’re not highly skilled at communication, taking classes may help. It may also be useful to build on your teamwork skills or employ technology that can help you collaborate more effectively.

Another area to evaluate is the project management tool that you use. Is it sufficient for your needs, or do you need an upgrade? For example, Hive is a great project management platform that helps boost team communication with its built-in chat application, collaborative note-taking tool and ability to @mention team members on any given task.

3. Acquire new skills or professional certifications

Whether you recently qualified or have been in the field for years, learning is an ongoing process. Keeping your qualifications and project management skills up to date is only the start. It also pays to become a member of a professional association or to network with other PMs.

Interacting with your peers gives you unique insights and an objective opinion on problems you may experience. Your experienced colleagues may be able to teach you more than you think.

Reading trade magazines, blogs, and newsletters is an alternative source of information.

4. Take on a high-impact project

It’s frightening to take on high-impact projects for your company because of the stakes involved. However, executing them flawlessly is one of the best ways to show upper-level management that you’re ready for more responsibility.

Before you embark on these projects, ensure that you understand your firm’s strategic goals and opportunities. Can you forward these tasks with these aspects in mind? What else can you do to assist? This project management goal will help your team massively in the long run.

5. Prove your value by tackling additional tasks

Don’t allow your current position to be the thing that holds you back. Improve your value to the company by going beyond a traditional PM role. Find ways to:

Train new team members and assist in retaining existing ones: You’re the one communicating closely with your team, so you’re often the one that they confide in. Guide new members to the resources they need and support existing employees to improve workplace satisfaction.
Work on innovative solutions: It’s every PM’s dream to develop a process that simplifies everything. Get creative and look at how your current procedures can be improved.
Speak to upper-level managers about team goals: Keeping in contact with your team and management improves project performance in the long-run because all stakeholders understand the logistics. Ask management to assist you with team goals to get the resources you need to be more efficient.
Research the competition: While not a part of your role, competitor research is extremely valuable. By understanding what other players in the industry are doing, you’ll be able to refine your firm’s service offering.

6. Measure the impact of your project’s successes

When a project is delivered on time, many kudos should be given to the person leading the effort. After all, it requires a lot of collaboration, time management, and organizational skills to get everyone to the finish line. Mapping out key elements of the process — such as turnaround time, meeting project budget, growth and stakeholders satisfaction — is a great way to measure the impact of your project management skills.

Pro-tip: Project management software with comprehensive features such as Hive will help you achieve this goal. Take advantage of Hive’s time-tracking to evaluate your team’s performance meeting deadlines or track stakeholders’ satisfaction with Hive’s Form. Use the data you collect from all these Hive tools to build your impact report.

Bonus tip: The insights from your report will also help mitigate potential risks and threats and guarantee you achieve your project management goals.

7. Foster a culture of continuous improvement

Ongoing development is an essential aspect of project management. As a project evolves, you want to cultivate a culture of continuous improvement within your team. Create an environment where your team feels comfortable sharing their thoughts on how things can be done better.

Some ways you can foster a culture of continuous improvement:

Conduct regular meetings to discuss lessons learned from previous projects and ways to improve going forward.
Encourage your team to attend training and workshops to enhance their skills and knowledge.
Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and identify areas for improvement.
Use Hive’s project management tools to help streamline processes and improve productivity.
Celebrate successes and recognize team members who contribute to the continuous improvement culture.

8. Enhance Decision-Making Skill

One important yet often overlooked part of project management is the ability to make logical and reasonable decisions quickly. A project manager’s decision can significantly affect a project’s path and team’s morale. Knowing that, an imperative goal for this year should be to boost your decision-making skills. This might involve enhancing your decision analysis and improving your ability to balance intuition and experience with data-driven insights.

Review your past projects and identify instances where decision-making was crucial to outcomes. Think about the decisions that led to both success and challenges. What information did you have at the time, and what would you do differently now? You might also consider training or educational resources, such as courses or books, to learn more about decision-making methods and strategies. This can also help to create an environment where your team members feel comfortable voicing their opinions and support your decision making process.

Hive can come in handy for you by providing visibility into your project data, making it easier to make informed decisions. With its analytics and reporting capabilities, the software can also help you measure the impact of your decisions on project outcomes, providing valuable feedback for continuous improvement.

9. Deliver a high-quality product or service

Defining success criteria is key when assessing a project’s performance. Now, an experienced project manager is also able to anticipate stakeholders’ expectations and deliver a service or product that can exceed the success criteria. It takes active listening, a good ability to inspire and engage other team members and someone able to master the pressure of working on multiple projects simultaneously and with different departments to deliver a high-quality final product or service. As the role of a project manager is to oversee all stages of a project in constant communication with stakeholders, it’s important that the PM encourages and inspires quality at all phases of a project. This can be done by for example: setting quality standards, conducting quality checks, and resolving any quality issues that may arise.

10. Reduce customer churn rate

This goal is typically seen as a mission for your marketing or customer success teams, but it’s actually an organization effort. It’s not only about reducing customer churn, but in the process you can generate insights on how to increase customer experience and improve retention rates. It’s key to have a measuring system in place, so you can track what’s working and what can be improved.

You can do that by using customer relationship management (CRM) software or analytics platforms, Hive Analytics, for example, can help you generate customizable reports on customer churn.

Then it’s time to put in place a plan which will include small tasks such as: conduct surveys with leaving customers (Pro-tip: use Hive forms), analyze their feedback, personalize the customer experience in your emails and follow-ups, provide timely support, offer incentives for customers to stay. The key to a successful customer success team is to focus on getting their customers promoted.

How your customer interacts with your product or service is key in measuring the scalability of your business and overall evaluation of your company’s health.

11. Streamline processes to control budget

Reviewing processes periodically is a habit at high performance organizations. Project managers looking to improve their team’s deliveries should also host quarterly or weekly meetings to evaluate how their workflow is working and what can be improved. This is a good way to boost team morale, by redistributing tasks and making sure no one is overworking themselves. It’s also a great way to control budget and eliminate unnecessary steps, as well as creating innovation and improving systems across the board.

12. Leverage the use of AI for project success

It’s 2024. There’s no going back from accepting the impact of artificial intelligence in project management — Hive’s founder and CEO John Furneaux, for example, believes soon enough artificial intelligence won’t be just helping someone manage their work, but doing their work for them. AI can be used to assist with resource optimization, checking for inefficiencies and maximizing productivity. It can also forecast project timelines, assess risks and resources with shocking precision. AI-powered tools in project management can also free-up the hands of smart project managers from routine tasks that can easily be automated such as status updates, reminders and progress tracking. Leaving PMs with more time for human-only things such as planning and decision-making. Platforms such as Hive, have embraced this new reality launching powerful features such as HiveMind. Hive’s AI automatically sets out the steps to accomplish any goal, expediting project planning and execution. HiveMind has the ability to create project tasks based on simple suggestions, set next steps from received emails, reply to emails based on the inbound message’s content and build entire projects from a simple prompt.

Tracking Your Project Management Goals

It’s one thing to set goals for yourself and your team. But tracking your progress and making sure everyone is working towards the finish line is the key to success. Fortunately, there are many goal-tracking apps that can keep you heading in the right direction. And for project management teams in particular, Hive is one of the best tools on the market when it comes to both managing your projects and tracking your goals.

With Hive Goals, Hive’s built in goal app, you can set goals, visualize progress, and keep everyone aligned in one centralized dashboard. This interactive Goals dashboard is much more than a list of end points — it’s your North Star. Easily create unlimited goals for yourself or share them with your team so that everyone understands what they’re contributing to. You can also assign a goal to relevant teammates, track activity, and give yourselves a deadline.

Final Notes

While these project management goals entail taking on more work, the experience and knowledge that you garner are essential. You’ll learn much that’ll improve your professional skills and your overall employability. It’ll also make it easier to do your work. Finally, by improving your firm’s competitive position, you’ll become an invaluable member of the team.

These 12 Project Management Goals Will Help You Achieve More In 2024