Project management goals are project objectives that involve developing plans, implementing strategies, executing the project to completion and accomplishing business plans. These goals may rely on a project's outcome, employee performance or completion of a larger company goal. Project managers often create these goals by determining what they want to achieve. It's useful to reference the company's mission statement to inform these goals.

Project management goals are very important as they help managers understand the business’ priorities that their projects are expected to contribute to.

One of the main reasons project management goals are important is to have a specific, defined target for you and your team. With a more defined target, it’s easier to direct your and your team’s attention and work toward reaching that target. This can help improve performance within your team.

There are three types of goals in project management:

1) Project Outcome Goals: Project Outcome Goals are the statements of tasks that need to be completed for the project. To create these goals, the project manager will look at the steps that need to be taken to complete the project (revise ad copy, refine keyword list, advise new keywords, provide monthly reporting), and add goal details about how they will know whether or not the outcomes are successful. The purpose and outcomes for these goals are taken from the original scope agreement with the customer.

2) High-Level Project Management Performance Goals: High-Level project management performance goals apply to the overall performance of the team and project manager. These goals measure efficacy, productivity, and success. These goals are important not only for proving you and your team’s value to stakeholders within the company but also for providing career growth and high performance for you and your team.

High-level project management performance goals include subjects such as:

• Increasing Productivity: It means tuning systems to achieve the best output for the inputs.
• Improved Predictability: It means being able to more accurately determine costs, timelines, and resource requirements to fulfill current and future objectives.
• Increased Gross Profit Margins: It means to maximize total profits and reduce cost of goods sold to improve gross profit margin.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: This may mean increased customer satisfaction scores, increased customer retention, decreased service complaints, or changes in reviews or responses online.
• Increased Employee Engagement & Satisfaction: It means improving workflow to better engage and support your employees to improve productivity and reduce turnover.
• Decreased Actual Cost: Preventing going over budget on projects and optimizing costs to improve profitability.

3) Project-Level Project Management Performance Goals: Project-Level project management performance goals apply to the high-level goals to a single project. Project managers should take the goals from the high-level list and apply them to the new project.

Project-Level Project Management Performance Goals include the following tasks:

• Analyze current workflow and overdue tasks to determine who has the bandwidth for this project.

• Review project timeline and team bandwidth to ensure timeline is achievable.

• Set clear deadlines for each task.

• Follow up once in a week to ensure the project is on-time with projections and to ensure rolling overdue tasks are 4% or less.

• Achieve final product delivery on time for a specified date.