Setting goals when you work in a delivery team in government
February 19, 2025
I originally wrote this guidance for people within the User-Centred Design profession in the Home Office.
It’s intended to give a pragmatic steer on how to set goals (which are a required part of our performance management process) that are actually meaningful and achievable.
But I hope that it will be of use to anyone who also works in really complex organisations where there are multiple levels of influencing strategy and higher level objectives that can make it hard to figure out how you are supposed to approach it.
The problem with how we currently set goals in large, complex organisations
Everyone agrees goals are useful.
But whenever I talk to people in the User-Centred Design community about how they set their goals, it is usually met with either anxiety or indifference (or a mix of the two).
I suspect the main cause of this is the way that the organisation recommends you set your individual goals, which are based on a number of assumptions that don’t fit the reality of working on a fast-paced, agile team.
For example, in my organisation, you are told to set SMART goals that are “aligned to strategic objectives and values”.
But which ones?
In Digital, Data and Technology, most UCD practitioners are working in agile product/delivery teams, which have their own goals and aims. But what about the wider programmes strategic objectives? Or wider DDaT ones? Where exactly do you find these and how do you know they are up to date?
The other problem with these levels of strategic goals are that they are often not created in a timely, sequential way to then be cascaded down for the next organisational layer to interpret. In an place as complex as this, they are published at different times, at different levels, for entirely different purposes (with competing drivers). It’s common for them to be written by people who work for a strategic function (usually in a rush) and tend to use lots of jargon and assumptions - making them hard to understand by the rest of us.
Delivering transformation and digital change on an agile product/delivery team often doesn’t operate in the same way as a ‘typical’ government project (despite all of the gantt charts to the contrary). We don’t usually create detailed plans and deliverables with milestones. Working on a delivery team is about using agile methods to test and build possible solutions in rapid, iterative cycles. Your contribution to the team as a UCD professional is in performing a specific function and so your work will change week-to-week. Goal setting in this context is incredible changeable and quickly out of date.
So, given all of this, how might we approach goal setting to be more useful?
How to set meaningful goals
Step 1: Reframe how you approach goal setting
In a large organisation with thousands of people there is, quite reasonably, a desire to ensure that everyone is working towards the same overall objectives, under a common purpose. In this context, individual goals are intended to be an articulation of how you will work towards that overall purpose, relative to the business area you work in.
But organisations like the Home Office are massively complex, frequently changeable and it is nigh on impossible to distil all the various levels of influencing factors into something that is personally relevant to you.
Instead of trying to interpret pages of vision statements and strategic objectives - I think it’s more helpful to begin by reframing your personal goal setting into a more meaningful and useful definition:
Personal goal setting is a way of agreeing a plan with your line manager to work meaningfully towards improving something about yourself, your profession, or the organisation.
Breaking that down, this means:
- agreeing a plan is about having a conversation with your line manager, who will help you understand relevant influencing factors, critique your ideas and - crucially - helps you access any support, training, or development you need.
- work meaningfully is about you committing to the positive change that fits with your own motivation and purpose. It’s about ensuring that you are making time for the tasks and activities you are agreeing to. You need to own your own goal setting. It should be personally relevant and satisfying for you.
- improving something is about working towards a positive change, whether that is in yourself (for e.g., improving your skills or experience) the wider profession (for e.g., processes and standards) or the organisation.
Step 2: Start with your purpose
You have a lot of autonomy about how you work and what you focus on, within a product/delivery team. But the direction that your goals should give you must originate from something core about you. So, it can be helpful to begin by thinking about your personal motivation and purpose - or your why.
According to author Simon Sinek, your why is:
“The compelling higher purpose that inspires us and acts as the source of all we do.”
You don’t have to spend hours on this, but the point is to spend some time to actually think about why you do what you do, in order to help give shape to your goals.
Getting this right, ensures that your goals feel right.
The following resources can help you come up with a short statement that resonates with you:
- Define your ‘why’: Simon Sinek’s model for inspirational leadership
- Find Your WHY - Simon Sinek - YouTube
Step 3: Generate goal ideas
Now that you have zoomed out to think about your own purpose, it’s time to get a little more specific.
Spend some time generating ideas that you can then turn into goals (you can do this on post-its or on digital whiteboard). Don’t worry about them being perfect.
Think about what you want to work towards, any career aspirations or skills you want to achieve in your role.
The following prompts might help you to kick-start things:
- Where do I want to be career wise in the next few years?
- Do I see myself doing the same role, or do I want to shift?
- If I’m not sure what I want to do, how might I figure out what that is?
- What activities do I like doing at work?
- What do I avoid doing at work because I’m not confident or afraid?
- Is there someone I admire, who does something I’d like to be able to do?
- What causes me stress and anxiety in my work?
- What problems am I noticing at work?
- Is there anything I’m passionate about fixing?
- What skills do I want to develop?
- How might I contribute my skills and knowledge back to the community (you can find some ideas in this blog post)?
These are just prompts, add anything else you think will help you generate ideas.
Alternative: try a skills and responsibilities assessment
This can be a helpful alternative way of generating ideas if you are interested in applying for a specific role in the future.
Make a table with two columns in Word/Google Docs. In the first column, write out each of the key responsibilities and essential skills from your desired jobs’ role description. Then in the second column, write 1 or 2 examples of how you can already evidence that skill or responsibility.
Where you have zero - or very limited - examples, these can then be used as a prompt to brainstorm ideas for how you might gain that experience - which can then be turned into goals.
For example, imagine in your assessment you can’t think of anything that proves ‘design leadership’. Turn it into a ‘How might we?’ question to instead ask ‘How might I demonstrate design leadership?’ Is there training you need? Is there an area of your everyday practice that you can train others on? Standards that you think should be developed?
These can be turned into projects that you can work on to show how you are leading some kind of positive change and cruicially, give you examples that can be used at interview.
Don’t beat yourself up
Whilst doing all of this brainstorming, do remember that not everyone is the same. We’re all good and bad at different things, creating differently shaped people. It’s not necessary or desirable for everyone to work towards being the same kind of designer or researcher.
You should think about what is important right now to you. Where are you in your life and career? Are you interested in a change, or would you prefer stability and consistency?
It’s also okay to not have clear career aspirations and instead just try different things. It’s also okay to be ambitious and want to progress your career - there is room for all.
Refine your list
When you can’t come up with any new ideas, group them and look for themes. Themes can then be used to write goal statements. The aim is to have around 4–6 goals. Review what you’ve come up with and sort them into priority order, highlighting the top 6.
Step 4: Write your SMART goal statements
Now’s the time to get even more specific and turn your prioritised themes and ideas into goal statements.
A goal statement contains the title and outcome you’re trying to achieve, the steps you are taking to achieve your goal, and a definition of done.
If you like, you can use the popular SMART format to help with this - but note that SMART statements help ensure you state your goals well, not whether the goals themselves are the right thing to do.
Read this article for a good overview of SMART goals: https://medium.com/@blazingsunlife/how-to-set-smart-goals-and-follow-through-31c0ea9529e2
Framing goals at the right level can take a bit of practice. Goals should give you the direction you need but not be so detailed that you need to revise them every month. But also remember that they will naturally change and adjust over time to suit the changing demands of your role, your interests and the organisational context - don’t feel bad about amending and updating them.
Whatever format you use to state your goals, they should contain as a minimum the following:
- A title summary. This should be a short title summarising what the goal is and why you are doing it (what benefit/outcome will it achieve?). Write is so that anyone outside your team could understand what you’re trying to achieve, e.g (‘Develop my skills with the GDS prototyping kit so that I am more confident and quicker at prototyping’)
- Action steps. Plan out the next actions you need to take in order to achieve your goals - for e.g., do you need to speak to a team, find out how a process works, obtain funding etc? The actions might be sequential steps, or simply ideas of how you might achieve the goal. These should be time bound. That could be a date they need to be achieved by or a regular date that it will be completed (for e.g., read ‘10 pages of ‘Design of Everyday’ book every week’). Try and be honest but stretch yourself where appropriate. You don’t need to be super detailed here, just record the chunks of work you need to complete. You will sometimes not be able to plan any further steps as you have a dependency on a key decision - for this I would just record the decision point as a kind of milestone, and then add more steps when you know more.
- The definition of done. How will you know that it the goal has been completed? If you don’t understand when it might be done, it’s probably too high level and needs to be made more specific. Think about what the minimum version of your goal might be, in order to release some positive change or value.
You will refine and rewrite your goals statements a lot. Get feedback on them from your colleagues and your line manager.
Step 5: Review regularly
It’s easy to set and forget goals, or to not make time for them because project work is considered more urgent and important.
Whilst there is always urgent work that can’t be avoided - you also need to plan time to work on your goals - this is also part of your job. If you can’t find time to work on them, think about how you have communicated this need to your team and line manager? Have you actually turned down meetings to focus on your goals?
You should talk about your goals with your line manager - don’t wait for them to bring them up, you need to own your own goals.
If you are finding it hard to make time for goals, you might want to rethink how you plan and organise your time. There is a lot written about productivity, but two techniques that I find incredibly helpful in particular is time blocking and holding accountability meetings.
- Time blocking is about planning your activity in your calendar, and not just using it for meetings. You schedule time to work on important goals or strategic work and try to keep to that time. It forces you to think about how long things might take and when in the day you are best suited to different activities. Read more about it here: Deep Habits: The Importance of Planning Every Minute of Your Work Day - Study Hacks - Cal Newport.
- I came accross Accountability meetings from a book called ‘The 12-Week Year’. This technique advocates for having a regular meeting with a colleague to peer review your goals, your progress and blockers. It’s intended to give you some critique on what is working and what isn’t. When done as a small team in which there is trust and familiarily, its an incredibly powerful way of helping you focus on what really matters and start saying no to more. Read more about it on: Team Accountability Project - Weekly Accountability Meeting
I really do believe that goal setting, when done right, is a great way to keep you focussed so that you accomplish meaningful change. It requires a bit of thought, but the effect of that planning pays of in multiple ways.
Let me know if you’ve found this helpful.