SMART goals: how Doran wrote the original in 1981
"We need to get better at communication." "The project will increase customer satisfaction." Goals like these sound fine in a steering committee meeting, but six months later no one can say whether they were achieved. The problem isn't the ambition – it's the wording.
In 1981, consultant George T. Doran published a short article in the journal Management Review with the punchy title "There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives". That is where the acronym SMART was born – the one used today in project management training all over the world, often without anyone knowing where it came from or what the letters originally stood for.
What does the research say?
Doran's core argument was simple: goals only become useful once they are concrete enough to guide action and to be followed up. Vague intentions – "get better", "improve quality" – provide neither direction nor any way of knowing when you are done. In the original article, SMART stood for Specific (target a specific area for improvement), Measurable (indicate an indicator of progress), Assignable (specify who will do it), Realistic (achievable with the available resources) and Time-related (specify when the result should be in place).
Two details are often forgotten. First: the A originally stood for assignable – someone owns the goal – not for "accepted" or "attractive" as later variants have it. A goal without an owner is a wish. Second, Doran was pragmatic: he wrote explicitly that not every goal needs to meet all five criteria in every situation. SMART is a checklist that sharpens your thinking, not a bureaucratic straitjacket.
Doran presented no statistical study – the article draws on his experience of corporate planning. But the idea has endured because it captures something later goal-setting research has also pointed to: clear, concrete goals steer behaviour better than vague ones.
What does this mean for you as a project manager?
Test your project goals against the five questions: What exactly is supposed to change? How will we notice it? Who owns it? Is it feasible with the budget and the people we have? When should it be done? A goal that passes all five is one you can actually manage toward. A goal that fails three of them will be interpreted differently by the sponsor, the team and the steering committee – and you only discover that once it gets expensive.
Use SMART in everyday micro-decisions too, not just in the project charter. When a stakeholder says "this has to get better", your job is to translate: "What would 'better' mean concretely, and when do you need to see it?" That translation is one of a project manager's most valuable skills.
And remember assignable: when you formulate goals in a meeting, never wrap up until every goal has a name next to it. It is uncomfortable in the moment and invaluable afterwards.
How to practice this
Formulating sharp goals sounds easy on paper but is hard in a live conversation, when a sponsor is impatient or a team meeting is drifting. That is why Project-simulator lets you practice exactly those conversations against AI counterparts and then gives you feedback on how concrete, measurable and time-bound your wording actually was – based on your own words. You can try it free for a week at project-simulator.com.
In Project-simulator you practice these conversations against an AI counterpart and get feedback grounded in research like this.
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