SMART Goals for Technology Project Managers

The SMART criteria for defining a goal are useful when it comes to managing a technology project, especially during requirements gathering. On paper, requirements gathering can look simple: ask stakeholders what they want. In practice, it is one of the most difficult and most critical tasks a project manager undertakes.

The quality and realism of requirements gathering is a primary make-or-break project task. If requirements lack adequate definition, teams build the wrong thing, test the wrong thing, and argue about whether anything is “done.” Using SMART principles forces clarity early, when misunderstandings are still inexpensive to correct.

Communication Gaps Between Business and Technology Teams

Communication gaps between a business sponsor and a technical analyst often increase the complexity of defining business requirements. In many instances, neither party naturally speaks in the other’s dialect. This is why it is critical that the project manager document a clear understanding of each requirement in terms that all parties agree with and can understand.

Executive sponsors often frame requests in broad terms aligned to strategic goals. That can be reasonable, but it can also hide the specific deliverables the team must produce. This frequently happens when an executive instructs a subordinate to have IT develop a solution. What the subordinate believes the project is may differ from what the executive intended.

To complicate the situation further, the technology representative may interpret the requirement differently again. In some cases, the technology representative enters requirements discussions with a preconceived solution and treats the meeting as confirmation rather than discovery. The sponsor hears agreement, but the team builds what they already planned, disregarding what the sponsor actually needs.

The outcome is predictable. The sponsor receives a product that does not meet the real need, scope creep accelerates, and poor design consumes the project budget and timeline.

Example: Wrongly Assumed Technical Agility

Some technology organizations like to consider themselves “lean and agile.” Consequently, they accept broad, generalized requirements statements with the expectation that analysts and developers will flesh out details later. They may believe it is too much work to gather and document this information at the beginning of the project.

In many cases, this is flawed logic. If the team relies on assumptions and historical patterns to complete requirements definitions, the project loses agility and innovation. The organization becomes locked into familiar approaches, and requirements become whatever the solution happens to deliver.

Sometimes teams claim requirements gathering and planning take too much time, or that “requirements will change anyway,” so developers should begin coding immediately. This approach shifts cost to later phases, when changes are more expensive and failure is harder to hide.

Adapting the SMART Objectives Framework

To control scope creep and ensure the team accurately captures stakeholder needs, SMART can be applied to requirements definition. In this approach, each requirement is written so it is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.

SMART stands for:

Specific – What exactly must be delivered?
Measurable – How will stakeholders verify it has been achieved?
Achievable – Can it be done with reasonable capability and effort?
Realistic – Is it feasible given constraints (time, cost, resources, quality)?
Time-Bound – By when must it be completed, or within what duration?

SMART requirements work best when they are written in a form that can be verified. If a requirement cannot be verified, completion becomes a matter of opinion and the team cannot reliably manage scope, testing, or delivery.

Example (turning a vague requirement into a SMART requirement):
Vague: “Improve the website performance.”
SMART: “For authenticated users, the dashboard page must load in under 2.5 seconds for at least 95% of requests measured over a full business day, by 30 June 2026, without reducing data accuracy.”
Project Management Institute (PMI): goal-setting and achievement in project work

By asking focused questions relevant to each SMART component, the project manager can ensure that business needs are documented and communicated in terms understood by all stakeholders. The project manager should continue to ask questions until the deliverable requirements are defined accurately. Be aware that a single deliverable often decomposes into multiple distinct requirements, and each one should be documented as its own line item.

Specific

The stakeholder should provide specific definitions of their requirements. The project manager clarifies requirements through progressive elaboration. A single deliverable may decompose into multiple work breakdown structure tasks, each requiring distinct resources. Without a specific definition of the deliverable, delivery is impossible.

Measurable

Once defined, the requirement must be measurable. The metric can relate to revenue, cost, performance, reliability, quality, risk reduction, or compliance. There must be a method of determining when the requirement has been met, stated clearly in terms all parties understand.

Achievable

A requirement must be achievable. If a goal is unachievable with reasonable resources, then its purpose is questionable. An unachievable requirement may result from misunderstanding the goal or overestimating the organization’s capability. Some requirements that are unachievable today may become feasible later, but they should be treated explicitly as future-state items rather than immediate commitments.

Realistic

The requirement must be realistic. Unrealistic requirements waste organizational resources and can run counter to business interests. Cost, schedule, resource, and quality constraints help define what is realistic, and the project manager must actively renegotiate requirements that cannot be delivered within those constraints.

Time-Bound

Any goal or business requirement must be time-bound. There must be a reasonable time expectation for performance and completion.

Without a time component, urgency disappears and the deliverable drops behind competing efforts. Open-ended requirements are a common source of drift and rework. Often the stakeholder can define a business time constraint. In other cases, the person doing the work should provide the most likely estimate of task duration, with the project manager capturing optimistic and pessimistic ranges when appropriate.

Benefits of SMART Approach

Using SMART project requirements can improve technology projects by:

Clearly defining what the team must deliver and when it is needed.
Making requirements verifiable so Quality Assurance can test against agreed criteria, reducing gold-plating and test-driven scope creep.
Creating a shared reference point so stakeholders can revisit what was originally agreed when priorities shift or memories change.

It may seem quicker to define deliverables using short phrases, but vague requirements usually create confusion and rework later. By gathering and documenting SMART requirements early, the project manager reduces misconceptions and prevents avoidable scope growth throughout the life of the project.

Planning omitted at the beginning tends to be paid for later through schedule overruns, cost overruns, and scope mutation. A small amount of early clarification can prevent a large amount of unnecessary build-and-fix work.