Before defining goals that are measurable, you and your partner should clearly agree on how the goals are to be measured, before and after. For example, if a goal is to reduce the number of chargebacks from a customer within 6 months, then it would be as simple as looking at the G/L accounts that you post the chargebacks to.

Some goals are tougher to measure, for example, if a goal is to increase productivity for the workforce, it may not be as simple as running some financial reports. For goals like these, it's recommended to define what does "increase productivity" mean? Is it to reduce the printed documents? Is it to reduce the time between customer service calls? Once that's defined, the next question would be how to quantify and measure the goal.

When defining a goal, it should be SMART, as shown in the following image:

Define different goals for your company and for the partner that is going to implement your Dynamics NAV. Each party will be responsible for different parts of the projects and their goals must be specific to the area they are responsible for. If the definition of the goals is clear enough, it will help everybody to focus on the tasks that will help to accomplish them. This is something that will benefit any party involved in the project.

Let's now take a specific example from a real-world Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementation. The example is from a company that provides public and private health care services. This company uses a specific health care software and an accounting software. With the explosive growth this company experienced, they needed something more robust to accommodate the changes for their company for now and the future as well.

They want to start out by replacing the accounting software, which only keeps track of accounting information. Through careful software selection, they made the right choice and selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV. As we described in the earlier chapter, Dynamics NAV is not just an accounting application, it is actually an ERP system that can do several business functions within an organization.

The main goal that this company wants to accomplish with Dynamics NAV is to make their departments stick to a budget. This budget will be established at the beginning of the year for each service that the departments offer. Nowadays, they do not have a detailed budget per service and they do not keep track of costs per service.

Making the departments stick to a budget is not actually a goal. It's not something specific or time bound; it is a general vision of where to go. To accomplish this vision, several goals that point in the same direction will have to be accomplished, one at a time.

The goals to accomplish that vision could be as follows:

Let's take that last goal to get a report of costs of a specific service. It is still a goal but it is not a SMART goal. It is specific, measurable, achievable, and relevant; however, there is no timing for the goal. Let's write down the goal in a different way: get a report of costs for a specific service at the end of each month. This is definitely a much a better goal.