To quote Kit DeLuca from the movie Pretty Woman, “You gotta have a goal. Do you have a goal?” It is easy to get people to talk about how their product or idea can solve a government problem. It is not as easy to get a good explanation on how they’ll know if they’ve succeeded. What does success look like to you? What metrics are you using to determine if you’re on track, if you’ve succeeded, or if you need to try again?

The Merriam-Webster definition of the word goal is “the end toward which the effort is directed.” What steps do you need to take to get to the end of your effort? Again, what does success look like to you? Often, goals are confused with deliverables or milestones. Deliverables are tangible products or actions that are contractually due to the government. These are things like reports, meeting minutes, software, hardware, etc. Milestones are gates. While milestones are like goals, they’re more event-based and result in an answer to the question “can we move forward to the next step?” So, if goals aren’t deliverables or milestones, what are they?  

A goal is a task or action you need to accomplish in order to complete your entire effort. For example, you are on contract to provide a prototype of a self-brewing coffee cup. The coffee cup should be able to hold 2 cups of self-brewed coffee and keep the coffee 165 degrees F for 3 hours or more. There are steps you need to take after a contract award to ensure prototype delivery. These steps should be translated into measurable goals as a way to track your progress and measure level of success. 

Here are a list of questions you can ask yourself when developing your goals:

• What does a functioning prototype mean? 
• Does the cup actually need to brew coffee on its own? 
• How warm does the coffee need to be?
• Do the buttons need to be functional? 
• Does the coffee cup prototype need to be true to size? 
• What steps do I need to take to produce the now defined functioning prototype? 
• Design a coffee cup that can hold 2 cups of coffee
• Ensure the coffee cup can keep the coffee at 165 degrees F for 3 hours

From here you can start to design a more robust description of your goals:

These are tangible goals that are measurable, achievable, reasonable, and in line with the requirements agreed upon by the company and the stakeholders. These goals will help guide you along the research and development process.

Why does this matter? It’s never enough to tell the government that you will produce something in a certain time for a certain cost. In order to justify their investment and facilitate planning, the government needs to know HOW you plan to accomplish what you’re proposing to accomplish. The government leads you in the right direction in SBIR/STTR proposals by requiring a milestone schedule and a work-plan. These two exercises are intended to ensure that all relevant stakeholders understand what you intend to accomplish and your plan for getting to the end. These two products can help you think through what goals you need to set for yourself to meet the milestone gates and align with your task structure. Additionally, if you want to get paid along the way, rather than at the end or once you’ve delivered your product, it is a good idea to have a clearly defined path for how you plan to get to product delivery. This allows all parties to agree to the proposed cost. The USG is using taxpayer dollars to help you complete R&D and therefore has an obligation to make sure you’re making progress. Setting measurable and realistic goals can help them help you. 

It's important to take a step back at key project milestones and ask, “Are we going in the right direction?” or “Are we succeeding so far?” and that is what goals can help you do! Most people have goals in life and you’ve thought through what it will be like to achieve that goal. Those types of goals are no different than these, you just have to be a little more specific. Admittedly, goal writing can be hard to do, especially in an R&D environment because sometimes you don’t actually know what success could look like. That is okay! Just do your best. The act of thinking through a goal and writing down its description and how you plan to track it are steps in the right direction. 

I’d love to hear about your experiences and success with goal writing, so leave me a message and let me know! 

Keep moving forward,