Setting Some Goals and Milestones

Although setting goals and milestones is not specific to the topic of directories, good goals and milestones are important for your directory design and deployment efforts. This task is often overlooked, even though everyone knows that goals and milestones are part of any good project plan. In this section we discuss the purpose of goals and milestones and explain how to choose them. Think of this section as Project Management 101 for directory project leaders .

Goals

Good goals help motivate people by providing a target to aim for. They help set and communicate expectations both inside and outside the directory deployment team. Goals are used to measure accomplishments and recognize success. For your directory service effort, try to choose some goals early so that you have something to shoot for throughout the project.

A good goal tells both what is expected and when , and it is easily understood by everyone involved in a project. Goals should be realistic, and the people who are asked to meet them should believe that they are achievable. Goals should also be measurable; that is, it should be clear to everyone when a goal has (or has not) been reached.

Some examples of good directory service design and deployment goals might include

• Requirements document completed and published for other groups to comment on

• Initial directory design completed and published

• Directory service up and running in a pilot environment

• Revised directory design completed and published

• Production-quality service deployed with one directory-enabled application relying on the service

• During every week, 8 out of 10 employees directly or indirectly using the directory service

• A 20 percent reduction in the time it takes to create all the necessary accounts and prepare the computing environment for a new hire

• A 40 percent reduction in the time and effort required by system administrators to manage data

Of course, you should choose target dates for these goals. Assigning accurate dates is usually difficult unless you have worked on a similar directory design and deployment project in the past. For some of the more distant goals, you should avoid trying to set a target date initially and just plan to set it as the project progresses. In some situations, a schedule may be imposed on you, and you won't have that luxury!

Milestones

Use a set of milestones to measure progress toward your goals. Milestones are especially important when the time frame in which you might achieve a particular goal is well into the future (more than a few months away); this way, you can use the milestones to check whether you are on track to meet the goal. Milestones also help you know when to adjust your overall schedule. If you achieve a milestone early, it might be possible to pull your entire schedule in and shorten the project plan. If you're late in reaching a milestone, the overall schedule will probably need to be lengthened. Finally, showing advancement against a set of milestones demonstrates real progress, which can help you when you need additional funding or buy-in from other groups.

Like good goals, good milestones help motivate people by providing intermediate targets they can aim for. As someone once said, "If not for deadlines, nothing would ever get done." If you're managing a directory design and deployment project, be sure you set achievable milestones and encourage individuals and the team to celebrate when those milestones are reached.

Choosing milestones is often easy after you pick your goals. The milestones should simply fall out of the goal as a series of tasks that must be accomplished to achieve the goal. For example, some reasonable intermediate milestones for the second sample goal mentioned earlier ("initial directory design completed and published") might include the following:

• Data and schema design completed

• Namespace design completed

• Server topology and replication design completed

• Privacy and security design completed

• Initial draft of complete design shared with your immediate colleagues to solicit feedback

Keep in mind that the purpose of milestones is to help motivate you and your team and to mark progress. If creating and tracking a large list of detailed milestones does not fit with your work habits and you feel you can succeed without them, feel free to ignore our advice here. For most people, though, milestones are a useful tool for marking progress as they move through a large project. It is usually more rewarding to complete small subprojects at regular intervals rather than to wait for the entire, long project to be completed.

Recommendations for Setting Goals and Milestones

We recommend that you select two or three short- term goals (achievable within the next three to six months) and two or three long-term goals for your directory design and deployment effort. Then for each goal set some intermediate milestones. The milestones can be as frequent as you want, but a good rule of thumb is to create milestones that you will hit every couple of weeks.

If you have a team of people working on the directory service, be sure to involve them in the goal- and milestone-setting process and make sure that they know what is expected of them individually. People who are involved in setting the goals and milestones will have a better understanding of them ”and they'll be more motivated to achieve them.

Tip

Share status information about goals and milestones with all who are involved or interested in your directory service efforts. Actively use the milestones to track progress toward your goals. By advertising exactly what you hope to accomplish and when, you implicitly enlist the aid of others and set reasonable expectations for the directory service deployment process.