Objectives

In project management, one of the fundamental elements in initiation stage is clear, well-defined project/business "objective(s)". This is a well understood 101 knowledge.

To my surprise, I found many people always forget this and they perform their works/assignments/tasks according to instructions/directives/orders without asking objectives (and so the completion/successful criteria). That should be fine for operational workers as their works are routine, repetitive basis. But that should not be acceptable to knowledge workers where most of their works have no standard but with many options and alternatives to achieve the same targets.

Such phenomenon may be caused by the abundant supply of so called "methodologies" and "best practices" where well defined working procedures and deliverables and even samples are clearly depicted. In theory, people simply follow (copy) such "methodologies" and "best practices" should achieve the best results. Unfortunately, this is not true.

For instance, I once managed a software project with high complexity in the implementation. In order to mitigate the risk of complexity, I assigned a project teammate to conduct an initial risk assessment during the early requirement analysis stage. The teammate did what I told him: He followed the company's project management framework and adopted the standard risk management template/procedure to carry out the work. At the end, I got a well written report with nice standard company format, plus rich content in full of very generic risk information (applicable to any projects) and there was little usage to the project (to identify and to evaluate possible specific risks in the project for early mitigation). What was wrong with him?

The teammate didn't ask the "objectives" of the assignment and he acted like an "operational worker" to manage the work per standard procedures. He didn't think what information should be required in order to achieve the "objectives".