Friday, November 7, 2008

Visions, Strategies, MGPPs & SMART Goals

A group of us are discussing Speed's concept of a TERM paper on his site. The challenge I believe we will run into is determining what is viewed as value added by the RAS community. (ie worth paying for, purpose of the school, etc)

District 281 and the RAS community worked hard to create a vision document this year. The concern I have is that per the listed priority and goals, the community agreed they want the school to offer everything to everyone. (ie flexibility, student specifc curriculum, excellence, arts, sports, academics, closing the achievement gap, etc)

One exercise we do at work to prioritize the customers wants is to give each member of the customer focus team 10 dollars, and ask them to distribute the money amongst the goals/features as they see fit. They can place them all on one or distribute them as they wish. This helps us develop trade off curves. (ie keep the valued features and leave off the non-valued)

Now I know we did something similar during the RAS vision meetings and am interested in finding out how the participating community members weighted the 24 goals. 1A through 2D most interest me, since this is where most the budget resides. (ie developing children into adults) How would you rank these? What would you give up so another could excel?

Here are 2 other useful acronyms to study: SMART Goals & MGPP

They are not as scary as they seem: imagine the Vision is to climb a mountain. The MGPP will be where you plan to set up camp each night. The SMART goal would be when you plan to reach the camp each day.... By the way, it does not have to be perfect and it can change when immovable obstacles are encountered. However, the Vision, MGPP, & SMART goals keep you heading in the right direction and let you know how you are progressing. Whereas goals with no measures will not tell you if you are making progress.

I believe it will be critical to develop an MGPP and yearly SMART goals in order to track the progress. This helps maintain accountability and focus.

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